The Real Russia. Today.

Thursday, September 1, 2022

Latest news

• 🗳 Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to seek second term in snap election
• ⚰️ Vladimir Putin not attending Mikhail Gorbachev’s funeral because his ‘schedule won’t allow it’
• ☢️ IAEA inspectors arrive at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant
• 🚨 Chairman of Russian oil producer Lukoil dies after fall from hospital window

Feature stories

• 🪖 Military expert Rob Lee breaks down Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive
• 🗳 What to expect from Moscow with votes staged in occupied Ukraine

Military analyst Rob Lee on Ukraine’s push to liberate Kherson and Russia’s manpower problem (15-min read)

Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive to recover territories in the southern Kherson region is now underway, but the situation at the front remains under wraps. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has barred journalists from reporting in front-line areas and has urged the press “not to question the actions of the command and not to serve as additional tools in the hands of Russian propaganda.” (Russian state media claimed that the counteroffensive had failed before it had even begun.) In this context, one of the only ways to assess the situation on the ground is to sift through and verify bits and pieces of open-source information. Military analyst Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), has been meticulously gathering operational data ever since Russia began its full-scale invasion in February. Meduza sat down with Rob Lee to talk about Ukraine’s push to liberate the Kherson region from Russian occupation.

The most likely scenarios for the Kremlin’s annexation ‘referendums’ (8-min read)

For more than six months, Kremlin officials have been waiting for the right moment to annex more of Ukraine’s territory. Early in the war, sources close to the Putin administration told Meduza that the Russian authorities hoped to conduct “referendums” on joining Russia in occupied Ukraine in May. When Russia’s progress in the war slowed, the plan shifted to July, then to September. Throughout August, the authorities seemed to change their plans almost weekly; the crux of their problem is that while Russia’s leaders feel growing political pressure to declare control over the occupied regions, they don’t actually control all of the land they want to annex. Meduza gives a rundown of the likeliest possibilities for the pseudo-referendums as of early September.

Opinion and analysis

🛂 The costs and benefits of restricting Russian travel to Europe

Ivan Timofeev, political analyst (Valdai Discussion Club): The benefits for the EU of imposing visa restrictions on Russia are primarily symbolic: there’s the political appeal of “containment” and signaling that the invasion of Ukraine has changed Europe’s relationship with Moscow. Even more moderate proposals offer the “moral self-satisfaction” of standing up to Russia. By raising travel obstacles for Russians, the EU could also confine visas to an even smaller group of “good Russians” (“your human rights activists, [Western-]loyal journalists, and public figures”) whom the West still believes are useful against the Kremlin. Europe could also add scientists and highly skilled workers, in order to aggravate Russia’s “brain drain.” Europe will pay some costs for erecting travel barriers for Russians: (1) lost tourism revenue, (2) diminished “soft power” influence over Russians, and (3) driving Russia to closer ties with potential future adversaries like Turkey and China. But the symbolism of restricting Russian travel to Europe is worth more, says Timofeev.

Conservative political elites in Russia will cheer this narrowing of access to Europe’s permissive “foreign values,” but the embrace of Western culture will persist. Instead of rejecting the West outright, Russians will rationalize the visa sanctions as the result of certain Europeans’ “parochial peripherality.” Timofeev concludes by urging Moscow not to reciprocate against the EU, arguing that open travel opportunities to Russia are the best defense against “propaganda and strategic communication.”

▻ Meduza’s notes: Timofeev’s remark about “parochial peripherality” is presumably aimed at anti-Russian sentiment in the Baltics, Ukraine, and other states where fears of Russian aggression have fueled the most radical proposals for collective punishment and “canceling” Russian cultural exports until there’s a reckoning with the imperial underpinnings. In the article, Timofeev balances his comments about the EUs’s soft power: European influence hasn’t achieved the desired results in Russia (Moscow is still hostile), but Russians will remain invested in Western culture, even if they have to do it remotely. Readers, also note that the Valdai Discussion Club is closely associated with the Kremlin.

⏳ The ruling elites are restless, and the war is a disaster, but Putin’s mistakes aren’t entirely what you think

Yevgenia Albats, journalist (The Moscow Times / The New Times): Albats begins by arguing that the Kremlin has achieved none of its objectives in Ukraine (which she says were based on false claims) despite paying enormous costs (sanctions and technological decline will “choke” Russia’s economy so badly that its “military-industrial complex will no longer be a threat to Europe and the world”). She says her own “Moscow sources who met with Putin on the eve of the military operation” say that the FSB likely didn’t deceive the president about Russia’s readiness to fight in Ukraine. In fact, contrary to numerous reports, “Putin listened to a variety of people” both for and against the war. Sources told Albats that Putin never intended to occupy all of Ukraine. Instead, the plan was to “eliminate” Zelensky and wait for the “domino effect” of panicked mayors and regional leaders bowing or fleeing.

Albats devotes the latter half of the text to domestic attitudes about the war, reasoning that the lack of public protests is due to (1) justifiable fear of prosecution, (2) “civil passivity” in the absence of opposition leaders, and (3) restricted access to information that makes the free press hard (but not impossible) to read (and purges the news media of the “infotainment” that typically “make[s] it go down easier”). Albats concludes by speculating that “Putin’s ruling class” might soon tire of the war’s costs and refuse “to live and die in a cage.”

▻ Meduza’s notes: Albats is one of the few vocal independent journalists who’s remained in Russia after the February invasion. In her article, she describes meeting with the sources who provided her with the insights that shaped this text. These people, in her words, are “more or less well-known, or high-ranking, or rich,” and none of them “openly supports the war.” Albats says many of her sources feared for their own safety just because they spoke to her. Earlier in the article, she also describes “people at a market” and the public silence of those who aren’t “unequivocal supporters” of the war, but she largely avoids generalizing what ordinary Russians think. Albats’s hopes apparently lie with Russia’s elites.

🤝 Pity the backward, persecuted Russians of the Baltics

Anastasia Mironova, writer and columnist (Gazeta.ru): The Russian diaspora in Latvia and Estonia is “stuck in the past,” living in poverty, and “frozen in development.” Their speech is old-fashioned, their pop-culture consumption is outdated, and even their jokes are out of style. At the same time, they still live “in our world,” fixated on Russian problems and glued to Russian television. “They consider themselves to be part of a larger people,” but they’re physically surrounded by Latvians and Estonians, the descendants of Nazi sympathizers and accomplices, says Mironova (repeating multiple times that the titular nationalities in Latvia and Estonia still “regret” not killing off all the Russians). She finishes by advocating funding for a repatriation program for the Russian diaspora in the Baltic states. “People need hope,” Mironova says.

▻ Meduza’s notes: Mironova can’t seem to decide if the Russian diaspora is isolated from culture in Russia or immersed in it remotely. Her suggestion that Latvia and Estonia are brimming with Nazis demonstrates how the Kremlin’s rhetoric against Ukraine can be applied elsewhere along Russia’s borders. When Ivan Timofeev mentions Russians’ perceptions about the anti-Russian influence of certain “parochial” groups in Europe (see above), he too is channeling the notion that animosity toward Russians in places like the Baltic states is rooted not in Moscow’s aggression and imperialism but in fascist ideology.

👑 Putin’s useful idiots aren’t always the ones you suspect

Alexander Podrabinek, journalist and columnist (Radio Svoboda): Putin has more “unconscious” friends (“useful idiots”) than outright allies. Podrabinek divides these people into seven groups (though some are clearly tailored to describe just a handful of specific individuals):

(1) “Putin’s main friends,” the Russian security officials whose loyalty can be bought with decent pay and reliable social status; (2) the defeated “Russian layman” who tries to compensate his own sense of worthlessness with feelings of belonging to “grandiose events” and “great people”; (3) the “political brotherhood of statesmen” (Podrabinek alludes specifically to former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder); (4) businesspeople who continue “paying Putin for gas,” inadvertently financing future Russian aggression beyond Ukraine; (5) people who think they’re Putin’s enemies but regurgitate the Kremlin’s own propaganda when criticizing Russia (for example, by arguing that most Russians support the invasion of Ukraine or that the Russian people elected Putin); (6) siblings of Group Five, these supposed Putin critics embrace his ethnic analytical frame, arguing that Russians are predisposed to fascism; and (7) Western celebrities (like Oliver Stone and Gerard Depardieu) who praise Russia for the material rewards but mainly to thumb their noses at their homelands.

▻ Meduza’s notes: Writing about the Russians who turn to “grandiose” associations as compensation for low self-esteem, Podrabinek describes behavior that resembles what Anastasia Mironova attributes to the Russian diaspora in the Baltics (except Mironova is sympathetic to the sentiment). When writing about Group Four, Podrabinek suggests that companies divested from Russia entirely on ethical grounds, oversimplifying why many corporations left the country. His aspersions against Groups Five and Six amount to a liberal criticism of Russophobia (Podrabinek implies that most Russians don’t support the war, that Putin lacks genuine popular support, and that Russian identity and imperialism are not intrinsically linked).

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