The Real Russia. Today. Criminalizing the sanctions, unseating the president, skipping the protest, and rescuing the puppies

Monday, May 14, 2018

• Lawmakers move ahead with plans to criminalize observing or aiding Western sanctions
• Medical care nonprofits ask the government not to “counter-sanction” Western drugs
• Rosneft's Italian partnership might be in trouble
• Vekselberg gets a mysterious bailout
• Russia denies a visa to the German reporter who helped blow the lid on the doping program
• A Russian Senate commission says the West tried to unseat Putin
• Sergey Skripal reportedly kept working to “thwart” Russia
• Trash protesters in Volokolamsk turn violent
• Attendance plummets at Moscow's latest Internet freedom rally
• The ECHR registers Telegram's complaint against a Russian fine
• The Kremlin reportedly withholds support for a new proposed crackdown on social networks
• Meduza summarizes a new report on Russia's policing of “falsifying history”
• A teenager pranks a cop and lives to regret it
• Prominent political consultant Igor Bunin dies
• Rosneft's spokesman apologizes to Armenia for a foolish outburst
• Medvedev announces plans for a high-speed railway between Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg
• Rescued puppies from Chernobyl are headed for the U.S.

Nothing is certain but sanctions and sanctions 💸

🚨 Traitors are gonna pay

Russian lawmakers have registered draft legislation that would make it a felony to observe foreign sanctions or even share information that could lead to the imposition of foreign sanctions.

The law would make it illegal to refuse cooperation with Russian entities because of sanctions imposed by another country. Such actions could result in fines as high as 600,000 rubles ($9,720) or up to four years in prison. People who “provide recommendations” or “supply information” “that has led or could lead” to new anti-Russian sanctions would face fines as high as 500,000 rubles ($8,090) or up to three years in prison with a 200,000-ruble ($3,235) fine.

The new legislation is reportedly the brainchild of Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, Federation Council Chairperson Valentina Matviyenko, and the leaders of all four political parties with seats in the State Duma. The government and the Supreme Court have already signed off on the proposal.

Russian opposition activists regularly petition foreign governments to add various Russian officials and entrepreneurs to sanctions lists, hoping to limit their travel options and make it harder to stash illicit wealth abroad.

This is all a response to what? In April, the U.S. government imposed sanctions on several Russian businesses and 24 oligarchs from the U.S. “Kremlin list” published in January. The Russian parliament is currently refining legislation that will authorize a series of “counter-sanctions” aimed at U.S. imports. Lawmakers are expected to vote on a first reading of this draft law on May 15.

💊 Don't take away our meds

Several medical care nonprofits have addressed a joint letter to the speaker of the State Duma and the chairperson of the Federation Council, asking lawmakers to exclude medical supplies from a list of counter-sanctions now making its way through parliament. The letter reportedly warns that a new boycott could affect medicines not technically registered in Russia but vital to patients nonetheless, as well as different medical equipment and supplies used by hospices and clinics that are otherwise unavailable in Russia.

Last week, the political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann revealed that a second reading of Russia’s “counter-sanctions” legislation ditches a list specifying which imported goods to ban in retaliation, in favor of an open-ended endorsement allowing the president to ban any products or raw materials that are not vital goods unavailable in Russia.

Lawmakers will vote on the legislation on May 15, but they’ll be voting on the draft law’s first reading. Attending a committee meeting at the Duma, Schulmann got her hands on a copy of the second reading.

🛢 Rosneft's last remaining Western partnership on shelf development

To avoid violating U.S. sanctions, the Italian company Eni might have to shelve its plans with Rosneft to conduct geological explorations, according to financial statements from these companies’ joint enterprises, reports the newspaper Kommersant. Eni is the last foreign company still working with Rosneft on shelf projects, after Western sanctions chased out ExxonMobil and Statoil.

According to the financial records, moving ahead with the plans could jeopardize funding for Eni’s “future operations.” Both companies nonetheless hope to proceed with their planned cooperation. In the past, Eni obtained a special permit to drill oil wells as part of its joint operations with Rosneft, despite economic sanctions against Russia.

Last month, the head of Eni told Reuters that his company had no plans to suspend its deals with Rosneft, while admitting that their joint venture in the Black Sea failed to make a commercial oil discovery. In 2017, the two companies extended their cooperation agreement to explore the Barents Sea and Black Sea. “It’s strategic for the energy security of Italy,” Eni’s CEO said.

🤝 Vekselberg's mysterious bailout

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov revealed on Monday that the Russian federal government has already provided a bailout to the billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, though he declined to offer further specifics. “Support has already been provided, last week,” Siluanov told reporters.

⚽️ No soccer for the squealer

Russian officials have reportedly added the German journalist Hajo Seppelt to their list of “undesirable persons,” refusing to grant him a visa to visit Russia during this summer’s FIFA World Cup. Since 2014, Seppelt has made several documentary films about Russia’s alleged state-sponsored doping program, such as “The Doping Secret: How Russia Makes its Winners.”

In response to Seppelt’s work, the World Anti-Doping Agency commissioned an investigation into Russian doping that led to the suspension from competition and disqualification of many Russian athletes, and the de-accreditation of Russian anti-doping laboratories.

Those meddlesome foreigners 🇷🇺🇺🇸

The Russian Federation Council’s Commission on Protecting State Sovereignty and Preventing Foreign Interference has come out with its latest bombshell: since 2011, the United States and other Western countries have tried to stop Vladimir Putin from winning presidential elections.

A new report due out by the end of the month claims that Western states tried to discredit Putin and “divide” his administration, in order to “isolate” him. The commission has apparently gleaned 10 different kinds of foreign meddling in Russia’s elections, including “publicly promoting from outside Russia” certain presidential candidates, cyber-attacking Russia’s Central Elections Commission, and funding sociological surveys.

In March, the commission published its first major report: an 83-page look at America’s history of meddling in various countries’ domestic affairs over the past half century. Meduza found that a significant part of its data was taken from an article written by a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in September 2016, with some additional excerpts copied from a book by the Stalinist pseudo-historian Igor Pykhalov, plus a bit lifted from Wikipedia.

Why target Skripal now after all these years? 🇬🇧🇨🇿🇪🇪

According to a new report by The New York Times, Sergey Skripal — the former double agent who was nearly killed in a nerve agent attack in England — “apparently traveled widely, offering briefings on Russia to foreign intelligence operatives.” These meetings “were almost certainly approved and possibly facilitated by the British authorities as a way to both educate their allies and provide Mr. Skripal with income.” Specifically, he met with Czech intelligence officials “on several occasions” and visited Estonia in 2016 “to meet with local spies.”

While these visits were “neither illegal nor unusual for defectors,” The New York Times says, “they meant that Mr. Skripal was meeting with intelligence officers working to thwart Russian operations in Europe, opening the possibility that his poisoning was a narrower act of retribution.”

• Read the full report here.

Protesters in Volokolamsk turn violent 😡

Outside Moscow, in the town of Volokolamsk, people have been protesting for months against a local landfill that’s spewing fumes into their air, but this past weekend marked the first time that anybody’s resorted to firearms. On Saturday, a gunshot aimed at a garbage truck smashed through the vehicle’s window and injured the driver in the arm. He was treated for the wound and released from the hospital that same day.

Before dawn on May 14, unknown persons tried to set fire to part of the new, upgraded section of the “Yadrovo” landfill. In mid-April, in response to local demonstrations, the facility stopped receiving trash at its older section. The landfill’s management is reportedly discussing closing down the dump, in light of the recent attacks and blockades by local residents.

In addition to their sustained protest movement, Volokolamsk locals have filed a class action lawsuit against the company that owns the landfill, demanding 5.5 million rubles ($89,000) in damages for pollution. Residents have also filed multiple lawsuits asking courts to close down the trash dump. On May 3, a judge rejected one of these cases.

The fight for Internet freedom ✊

📢 Telegram and protests

Attendance in Moscow at Sunday’s rally for Internet freedom drew significantly fewer people than a similar demonstration on April 30. According to independent observers, just 2,280 people turned out — 10,000 fewer protesters than two weeks earlier. Police nevertheless detained more than two dozen demonstrators for criticizing the president and the government — issues that “were unrelated to the purpose of the rally,” and therefore technically beyond the scope of the event’s city permit.

What was different about the second rally? The first one was organized by the Libertarian Party, while the second demonstration was staged by a coalition of democratic groups, including PARNAS, Yabloko, Open Russia, and Russia’s Pirate Party.

Roskomnadzor has been trying to block the instant messenger Telegram since April 16, when the service had roughly 15 million users in Russia. Roskomnadzor has blacklisted roughly 20 million IP addresses in an effort to cut access to the app. Thanks to a sophisticated circumvention network, however, Telegram is still working normally for most users in Russia, but hundreds of other online services have suffered disruptions, as Roskomnadzor has blocked various major cloud-computing providers.

On May 14, lawyers representing Telegram reported that the European Court of Human Rights has registered their complaint against the 800,000-ruble ($13,000) fine imposed on the company for refusing to surrender encryption keys to Russia’s Federal Security Service. The ECHR has also reportedly invited Telegram to file a “full complaint” against the April 13 court ruling that sanctioned the blocking of the instant messenger in Russia.

👎 The Kremlin pours cold water on a new Web crackdown proposal

The Kremlin has reportedly withheld its approval for a draft law that would have saddled social networks with major new obligations. The State Duma passed a first reading of the legislation on April 12, and the deadline for accepting amendments for the law’s second reading expired on May 11. The parliamentary working group tasked with finalizing the law hasn’t even formed yet, and the Kremlin apparently doesn’t need the law “even in a revised form,” sources told the newspaper Kommersant.

The law in question would require every major social network to establish legal representation in Russia, force these services to identify users by their telephone numbers, and require networks to remove “all illegal information,” “fake news,” and content promoting “pornography, obscene language, and cults of violence” — all within 24 hours. Read more about the proposal here.

⛔️ Russia's unfinished war on “Nazis”

Last week, lawyers from the “Agora” international human rights group published a new report on prosecutions in Russia against people accused of “falsifying history.” The study reviews 100 cases over the past 10 years that either directly or indirectly related to writings about history. Most of the cases involved the 20th century, and the “riskiest” topics were the Second World War and the USSR’s role in that conflict. In Russia, being convicted of “falsifying history” can mean administrative or even criminal penalties. Courts can also ban “informational materials” on the pretext of fighting extremism, and they can classify documents in archives.

• Read the full story at Meduza: “How Russia prosecutes its own people for ‘falsifying history’”

Life after a very bad idea 👮‍♂️

A teenager in Moscow faces up to five years in prison for what appears to have been an enormously unwise prank. On May 6, the man walked up to a group of national guardsmen, wrapped his arms around the shortest officer, and carried him a few feet, laughing with every step, before the others grabbed him and pinned his arms back. On May 12, a court released the man on his own recognizance, though investigators wanted him placed under house arrest.

Russia loses a noteworthy think tanker ⚱️

Igor Bunin, one of Russia’s most prominent political consultants, died over the weekend at the age of 72. He reportedly passed away after a stroke. Since the early 1990s, Bunin acted as the president of the Center for Political Technologies, advising powerful officials like Vladimir Putin, former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and current Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin.

According to Transparency International, Bunin’s center won 30 state contracts for sociological research and political consultancy between 2011 and 2017 worth roughly 96 million rubles ($1.6 million).

Rosneft's Armenia problem 🇦🇲

Mikhail Leontyev is working hard to pull his own foot from his mouth, after insulting Armenia in a recent radio interview. The press secretary for the oil company Rosneft, Leontyev told Komsomolskaya Pravda that Armenia “wouldn’t exist” were it not for Russia’s support.

On Monday, he wrote an open letter to Armenia’s new prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, apologizing for his “emotional and unacceptable” outburst, and explaining that his comments do not reflect the company’s position or views. Immediately after Leontyev’s remarks, Rosneft’s press office issued a statement distancing itself from the press secretary, who also serves as the company’s vice president.

High-speed ambitions 🚄

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a government order on Monday on the construction of a high-speed railway connecting Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg, designed to make the 220-kilometer (137-mile) trip in 70 minutes, instead of the current three and a half hours. The project, which is expected to wrap up in 2024 and to cost roughly 360 billion rubles ($5.8 billion), is supposed to become part of a future high-speed railway connecting Moscow and Beijing.

In 2013, Vladimir Putin announced plans to build a high-speed railway between Moscow and Kazan. The project fell through, however, when it turned out that developers wanted too much government assistance.

Saving the Chernobyl puppies 🐶

Ukrainian state officials announced this Monday that they’ve rescued 200 puppies from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The animals are being monitored for radiation poisoning and quarantined at a special shelter in Slavutych for 45 days before they’re sent to the United States for adoption.

The dogs living in Chernobyl today are descended from the animals abandoned in the evacuation of the city in 1986, when fleeing residents were not permitted to take their pets with them. According to The Guardian, there are at least 300 stray dogs living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone today.

In 2017, the “Clean Futures Fund” American nonprofit organization opened three veterinary stations in the exclusion zone, where they inoculate and sterilize stray dogs. The group also plans to study the effects of the area’s radiation on the animals.