The Real Russia. Today.

Evgeny Prigozhin’s latest political gambit, Putin at Valdai, and new European sanctions

Thursday, October 22, 2020

• ‘Putin’s chef’ reportedly wants to expand his political influence and maybe even win a seat in Russia’s Parliament
• EU imposes sanctions on GRU officers over ‘Fancy Bear’ cyberattacks
• Putin’s speech at the annual Valdai Discussion Club, in a nutshell
• Billionaire Arkady Rotenberg’s company tops list Moscow’s main outside contractors under Mayor Sobyanin
• News briefs: a troubled ventilator manufacturer, a maybe-vaccinated lawmaker gets COVID-19, a very brief house arrest, and Putin’s personal favor for Navalny

Feature stories

🗳️ Nobody needs another Prigozhin

Evgeny Prigozhin, the Russian catering oligarch who allegedly owns a private military company and an Internet troll empire, wants to become an elected politician and he plans to use the “Rodina” party as his ticket into the State Duma, two sources close to the Putin administration and one person inside Prigozhin’s own inner circle told Meduza. Asked about his own political ambitions, however, Prigozhin denies any wish to become a federal lawmaker, and he even has a special message for the people reading this very article.

🏗️ Ten years of construction

Russian billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, a friend of President Vladimir Putin, has been the main outside contractor for the Moscow authorities during the ten years that Mayor Sergey Sobyanin has been in charge of the city, reports a new joint investigation from the investigative site Proekt and business magazine Forbes. Read Meduza’s summary here.

👾 Not so fancy anymore, are you?

The Council of the European Union has imposed sanctions against two Russian citizens and a military intelligence center due to cyberattacks targeting Germany’s parliament in 2015 and against the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in 2018, according to an announcement in the latest volume of the Official Journal of the European Union. The United Kingdom announced plans to enforce these sanctions, as well. What luck contestants were selected for this patriotic honor of troubling Russia’s neighbors to the west? Click here and find out.

🎙️ Putin at Valdai: Cold War, coronavirus, climate change

On Thursday, October 22, Vladimir Putin gave a speech at the annual Valdai Discussion Club via video link. He talked for about 40 minutes and covered a wide range of topics, including the coronavirus pandemic, the post-Cold War world order, and the existential trials and tribulations of our times. Here’s what he said, in a nutshell.

Other news in brief

• 🏥 Too hot to handle. An arbitration court has fined the Ural Instrument Making Plant about $6,500 for manufacturing faulty medical equipment. The factory’s parent company, Concern Radio-Electronic Technologies (itself a Rostec subsidiary), says the regulatory violations were unrelated to several “Aventa-M” artificial ventilators that caught fire at two hospitals in Russia and killed six people in May 2020.
• 💉 Definitely the placebo. State Duma deputy Valery Gartung has tested positive for COVID-19. He’s one of 40,000 people participating in the Stage III trials of “Sputnik V,” Russia’s first registered vaccine against the coronavirus.
• 👮 Not so fast, pal. Businessman and former politician Anatoly Bykov was re-arrested in Krasnoyarsk hours after he was transferred to house arrest. He’s a suspect in an ongoing criminal case and allegedly organized contract killings in the 1990s.
• 😇 No need to thank him. Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated that he personally helped ensure opposition figure Alexey Navalny’s medical evacuation to Germany. Putin added that “the defendant” wouldn’t have been allowed to go abroad if he’d had been poisoned by the Russian authorities.

🛰️ This day in history: 45 years ago today, on October 22, 1975, the Soviet unmanned space mission Venera 9 landed on Venus. The orbiter was the first spacecraft to orbit the planet and the lander was the first to return images from the surface of another planet.

Yours, Meduza