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The Real Russia. Today. Monday, June 3, 2024 — Meduza [1]

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Date: 2024-06-04  

The war in Ukraine

🙏 Wives and mothers of mobilized Russian soldiers protest outside Moscow’s Defense Ministry (1-min video)

A group of wives and mothers of mobilized Russian soldiers picketed outside of the Defense Ministry building in Moscow on June 3. The women brought their children and wore t-shirts and carried signs with slogans like, “Please bring my dad home” and “It’s time for the mobilized to come home,” referring to servicemen who were drafted into the army as part of Russia’s mobilization drive in September 2022. They also demanded a meeting with Russia’s recently appointed Defense Minister, Andrey Belousov. When police arrived at the scene, the protesters knelt down on the ground.

💀 Imprisoned Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin says three of his cellmates died fighting in Ukraine (3-min read)

In a social media post shared from prison, Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin writes that three of his cellmates went off to fight in Ukraine and died at the front. Yashin, who remained in Russia after Moscow began its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, was sentenced to 8.5 years in prison for speaking out against Russian atrocities in Bucha. He has been in the IK-3 penal colony, a prison in Russia’s western Smolensk region, since December 2022. He met the three men in question during his first weeks in IK-3 — before he was transferred to a high-security barracks.

☦️ New government data show varying religious trends in Ukraine

New data published by the Ukrainian government shows a spike over the past two years in the number of religious organizations registered in the country. Though recent sociological research like polling released by the Kyiv-based think tank Razumkov Center shows that just 5.6 percent of respondents self-identify as members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), nearly 30 percent of the religious organizations registered in Ukraine are under the UOC-MP’s jurisdiction. At the same time, self-identification among Ukrainians for the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) is 42.2 percent, but the OCU controls just 22 percent of the country’s religious organizations. The same new data show that minority protestant churches manage the greatest number of religious educational institutions in Ukraine. The country’s most religious region remains Lviv. Similar data is unavailable from Russia, though the newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe notes that the Kremlin’s “repressive confessional policies” are not conducive to the rise of religious organizations evident in Ukraine.

🪖 Russia’s conscientious objectors at gunpoint

In a report for Verstka Media, journalist Olesya Gerasimenko describes how the Russian authorities force men called up for mobilization to fight in Ukraine, even when they try to flee the military or are willing to submit to prison to avoid combat (or sometimes further combat). Gerasimenko tells the stories of three veterans, identified as Vladimir, Gennady, and Sergey, and details what they’ve witnessed while trying to avoid being sent back to Ukraine. Gerasimenko learned that hundreds of mobilized soldiers in regions across Russia who refuse to go to Ukraine are being held by military police in what amounts to modern-day dungeons where they’re beaten and kept in miserable conditions.

The carrot and the sticks: Officials try to tempt the men by offering to close the draft-dodging felony charges against them, though these deals are made without the involvement of Russia’s legal system (no prosecutors, investigators, or lawyers). The conditions pressure some men into self-harm and others into attempted escapes (though they have few prospects “on the outside” when wanted by the military). The friends and relatives of some of the mobilized men now in custody told Gerasimenko that Russian officials last month started sending these prisoners into the trenches with their hands literally bound. The men are led into battle “at gunpoint” to join assault brigades as punishment for refusing to fight.

🔍 NYT traces Russian campaign to transfer children from Kherson permanently

In a new long-form investigation, The New York Times reports on 46 children whom Russian officials took from a state-run foster home for institutionalized children with special needs in Kherson and moved to two children’s facilities in Crimea. “Because Russia has not formally tracked the children’s movement or given intermediaries access to the children, the evacuation is a forcible transfer under international humanitarian law” — “a blatant war crime,” Stephen J. Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador at large for global criminal justice, told the NYT. Though Russia has promised to place the children with Russian foster families only if their birth parents could not be identified in Ukraine, officials have actually moved forward with their cultural assimilation, issuing Russian birth certificates, social security numbers, and so on.

What’s become of these kids: NYT journalists found the profiles of 22 of the children from Kherson on a Russian adoption website (with no mention of their birth country). At least two of the children have been placed with Russian families, reports the newspaper. “Seven of the children from Kherson Children’s Home have returned to Ukraine with the assistance of Ukrainian authorities and third-party Qatari mediators,” the NYT reports. One of these children later died due to an epileptic seizure. The girl’s brother has returned to state care while a court weighs his birth parents’ fitness for guardianship.

☢️ Russian political analysts duke it out over the kind of nuclear deterrence Moscow needs

Over the weekend, the Russian news agency Interfax published commentaries from Alexey Arbatov (the head of the Center for International Security at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations) and Dmitry Trenin (a research professor at the Higher School of Economics) about a recently concluded forum in Moscow on “Nuclear Deterrence in a Polycentric World.”

Alexey Arbatov: He argues that nuclear deterrence remains “a crucial factor in international life and the foreign and military policies of leading states,” despite the proliferation of nuclear weapons and growing fears of a nuclear exchange in various hotspots around the world. Arbatov speculates that NATO “long ago” would have expanded to Ukraine and engaged Russian troops directly, were it not for nuclear deterrence. In a thinly veiled criticism of analysts like Trenin, Arbatov observed that several “independent strategists” (his scare quotes) advocate an extreme type of “offensive” nuclear deterrence in addition to the traditional defensive iterations. Arbatov says nuclear containment today falls along the fault lines of military-political “polygons” (for example, Russia’s nuclear deterrent “addresses” the U.S., U.K., and France, while America “addresses” Russia, China, North Korea, and maybe Iran, whereas a state with fewer nukes like India “addresses” China and Pakistan.) This rise of “multilateral, dynamic, and asymmetrical” nuclear relationships means leaders should negotiate within their own “polygons” instead of assuming that a fully global accord is necessary for any progress on arms control.

To make progress on nuclear threats related to the war in Ukraine, Arbatov stresses the need for “reducing the conflict’s intensity” and negotiating limits and restrictions on tactical nuclear weapons. This is tricky, he points out, because non-strategic nuclear weapons are deployed on dual-purpose carriers and stored in depots during peacetime. This means that limits can’t realistically be achieved by reducing carriers, which leaves negotiating controls on storage facilities and even manufacturing plants — a tall order, Arbatov admits. To begin this process, he says the U.S. should withdraw its 100-or-so tactical nukes from Europe, given that these weapons so close to Russia’s European territory are effectively strategic weapons that Russia lacks so close to the U.S. for parity.

Dmitry Trenin: Trenin agreed that nuclear deterrence continues to work, but he says the tensions between nuclear states and multipolar proliferation of the weapons have led to a “systemic crisis” that risks nuclear war. Trenin places much of the blame for this deterioration in relations on Americans’ faith in their “own omnipotence” and Europeans’ “strategic parasitism,” which has undermined their “sense of self-preservation.” These attitudes, says Trenin, have cultivated the idea of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia through a conventional proxy war in Ukraine. Western logic, he says, is that Russia must accept defeat in order to spare the world from nuclear Armageddon.

Echoing an argument he’s made since early in the full-scale invasion, Trenin advocates dispelling the West’s “dangerous illusion” by resorting to “active nuclear deterrence.” Specifically, he says Moscow’s conditions for using nuclear weapons should be lowered to responding to mere “threats against the country’s vital interests” (rather than threats to the state’s very existence). Most importantly, says Trenin, Moscow must signal to Washington that it won’t accept defeat in Ukraine.

🍿 More and more moolah for patriotic popcorn flicks

Agentstvo Media reports that the Russian state has been spending more on the film industry since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine — 3.5 times more on films about war and conflict with the West. Journalists found that the Cinema Fund and Culture Ministry's average annual spending on such storytelling has jumped from 640 million rubles ($7.93 million) to 2.35 billion rubles ($29.13 million). The government has helped finance movies about Soviet pilots during WWII, the liberation of Jewish prisoners during WWII, a young man enlisting with Donbas separatists after 2014, Soviet submariners battling a monster off the U.S. coast during the Cold War, a secret artifact hunt in Cuba, and Russia’s first modern film about the Vietnam War. There’s also a film in production by one of Gazprom Media’s subsidiaries about a Soviet submarine going to the North Pole to demonstrate a potential nuclear strike against the United States.

📺 While YouTube works to remove Russian propaganda, its algorithm keeps pushing pro-Kremlin videos (7-min read)

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, YouTube has removed tens of thousands of Russian propaganda and pro-war videos. Still, the platform hasn’t entirely rid itself of this type of content. Channels with videos that praise the Russian government and the war in Ukraine are still accessible and boast hundreds of thousands of subscribers — and millions of views. Moreover, YouTube’s algorithm continues to recommend these videos to users. Meduza explains what’s happening with pro-Kremlin content on the world’s largest video-sharing platform.

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As the world turns

⚖️ American right-wing extremist extradited from Ukraine to face trial: Ex-Army soldier Craig Lang has been extradited from Ukraine to the U.S. to face numerous charges in three federal districts relating to double homicide, armed robbery, false statements in a passport application, aggravated identity theft, and misuse of a passport in violation of conditions and restrictions, among other charges. Lang fought in Ukraine as a foreign volunteer in 2015–16 and later returned to Ukraine after allegedly “robbing and killing a Florida couple in 2018 to fund more foreign fighting adventures,” reports journalist Christopher Miller.

🇬🇧 Moscow’s U.K. stop list now grows namelessly: Apparently tired of naming British individuals, Russia’s Foreign Ministry announced on Monday that it is adding to its diplomatic “stop list” an unspecified number of “representatives of the [U.K.] political establishment, journalism, and expert community.” The new group banned from entering Russia includes “local politicians responsible for formulating and implementing London’s anti-Russian policy, journalists caught lying and spreading Russophobia, and experts portraying important sociopolitical events in [Russia] in a negative and inaccurate light.”

💰 Leaked docs reveal sweeping ‘Kremlin influence operation,’ including budget for Russian agents’ legal fees

Leaked internal documents obtained by the Danish public broadcaster DR from a European intelligence source and shared with a consortium of European journalists reveal that the Fund for Support and Protection of the Rights of Compatriots Living Abroad (Pravfond) is part of a “Kremlin influence operation active in 48 countries across Europe and around the world,” reports The Guardian. The documents reportedly show that “the foundation finances propaganda websites targeted at Europeans” and “helped pay for the legal defense of the convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout and the assassin Vadim Krasikov.” Specifically, lawyer Robert Unger received €60,000 ($65,380) in legal fees paid out by Pravfond’s budget in 2021 to defend Krasikov, an alleged FSB agent who was sentenced to life in prison for killing a former Chechen field commander in Berlin in 2019.

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