The Real Russia. Today.

Monday, May 15, 2023

Greetings, readers. Our main stories over the past weekend and this Monday focused on the air war in Ukraine and Russia’s border regions. Meduza also tracked developments involving multiple third parties in the conflict, including Belarus, France, Germany, Finland, and Norway. For feature-length reporting, we’ve got a summary of an interview with Vladimir Putin’s supposed personal confessor and “spiritual guide” (he’s got big geopolitical ideas about China and the West), plus check out our interview with political scientist Erica Frantz about her research into how authoritarians fall from power (it ain’t easy, and it’s rarely pretty).

The air war

💥 The big story over the weekend was multiple military aircraft crashing in Russia’s Bryansk region. Even before the wreckage was cold, numerous theories about the cause started circulating on social media. Maybe it was saboteurs operating inside Russia? Maybe Ukraine’s air defenses got to them? Apparently adding to his public attacks on the Defense Ministry, Wagner Group head Evgeny Prigozhin (more about him below) suggested that the aircraft might have been hit by friendly fire from Russia’s own air defenses.

• 🤝 Over the weekend, Prigozhin remained one of the most prominent figures of Russia’s invasion, though he didn’t catapult himself into headlines this time with a self-released Telegram video. On Sunday, citing previously unreported U.S. intelligence documents leaked on Discord, The Washington Post revealed that Prigozhin allegedly offered to tell Ukraine’s military where to attack Russian troops if they agreed to pull back their own forces from the beleaguered city of Bakhmut. On Monday, Prigozhin responded by accusing the Post’s journalists of misunderstanding the contacts needed to negotiate POW exchanges. He also argued that troop locations aren’t coveted, secret information in the age of satellite footage.

💰 Whatever the reason for Bryansk’s dangerous skies over the weekend, the Russian authorities are moving forward with a hefty investment of 1.7 billion rubles ($22 million) into radio-network analyzers earmarked for use in Crimea and the Rostov region. Officials say the equipment will “solve more than 80 percent of the problem of drone incursions into Russia.”

🎯 Amid these reports of Russia’s struggles to control its own airspace, the Defense Ministry claimed on Monday that it recently intercepted a Storm Shadow cruise missile. A few days earlier, the media first reported that the U.K. has delivered these long-range missiles to Ukraine. (Last week, the Pentagon confirmed Ukrainian reports that a Patriot missile-defense system successfully intercepted one of Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, while Moscow insists that this is impossible.) On Sunday, the Ukrainian military said it shot down 25 drones and three cruise missiles in a wave of Russian airstrikes that reportedly damaged homes and local infrastructure in the Ternopil and Kharkiv regions.

🤝 While Russia was busy supposedly knocking a British-made rocket from the sky, France pledged to send dozens of armored vehicles and light tanks to Ukraine after a surprise three-hour meeting between Zelensky and Macron on Sunday. A day earlier, Germany agreed to supply Ukraine with military aid worth a total of 2.7 billion euros (nearly $3 billion). Moscow sent its own message to NATO, deploying 16 strategic bombers near Russia’s border with Finland and Norway (according to new satellite imagery). The warplanes stationed at Olenya Air Base have regularly participated in cruise-missile attacks on Ukraine in recent weeks.

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Feeling unwell

💀 It’s been a rough few days for Russia’s military brass on the ground in Ukraine. On Sunday, the Defense Ministry reported the combat deaths of two commanders in the Donetsk region. (Moscow is typically reluctant to acknowledge soldiers’ deaths, except when discussing senior officers in the context of posthumous awards.) The following day, the interior minister of Russia’s “LNR” puppet statelet was seriously injured when a bomb exploded at a barbershop in Luhansk. Russian state media are calling the blast an attempted assassination.

🇧🇾 Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko reappeared for state news crews on Monday after vanishing for six days, amid rumors that he was gravely ill. (Speculation became so rampant that even the Kremlin’s spokesman felt it necessary to weigh in and urge the public to trust the “official information.”) Perhaps to ensure that nobody dismissed the footage as prerecorded, Lukashenko met with military officials to discuss the Russian warplane crashes in the Bryansk region over the weekend. He also revealed that Belarusian troops have been on “high alert” since those incidents.

✈️ A lack of reliable information also fuels guesses about the current state of commercial aviation in Russia, where Aeroflot has reportedly instructed senior flight attendants consult their pilots before recording any technical failures or cabin-equipment malfunctions. Investigative journalists at Proekt learned that the new policy is intended to conceal malfunctions that officially prevent a plane from being allowed to take off. (Last November, Meduza’s podcast The Naked Pravda explored how Western sanctions have forced Russian commercial airlines to cut numerous safety corners.)

• 🇬🇪 A bright spot for Russia’s aviation industry is the Georgian government’s decision (over President Salome Zurabishvili’s objections) to clear the airline Azimut for direct flights into the country. Tbilisi says it will permit direct flights from Russian carriers that aren’t on international sanctions lists, and the Georgian authorities say they’re already considering applications from another four airlines. (Putin recently lifted Moscow’s ban on direct air travel between Russia and Tbilisi.)
• 🇺🇸 Despite Russia’s battle with aviation sanctions, new U.S.-made technology continues to reach Russian airlines, journalists at The New York Times reported on Monday, describing data analysis that shows tens of millions of dollars of aircraft parts were sent to explicitly sanctioned companies, including Rossiya Airlines, Aeroflot, Ural Airlines, S7 Airlines, Utair Aviation, and Pobeda Airlines.

Russian statecraft today

👋 Investigative journalists at iStories report that senior Russian officials now risk felony charges if they try to resign from office while the war in Ukraine is ongoing. The Putin administration reportedly makes exceptions to this new rule, but the general policy holds that stepping down now without being asked is tantamount to “betrayal.”

🗳️ As the Kremlin allegedly forces governors and other top bureaucrats to stay put, State Duma lawmakers have amended draft legislation that would empower the president to order the deportation of residents in annexed Ukrainian territories (where Russia has declared a state of martial law). The draft law itself establishes procedures for holding elections in these occupied regions, where Moscow already staged “referendums” last year in an attempt to legitimize its seizure of the territories.

☦️ Putin may soon have new formal powers to force Ukrainians to leave their homes, but he’s already ordered home Andrey Rublev’s famous “Holy Trinity” ikon, making it once again the property of the Russian Orthodox Church. The president’s decision to remove the object from the State Tretyakov Gallery has alarmed art conservators, given that the monastery in Zelenograd where the ikon will be transferred permanently had it for just three days last summer and managed to inflict critical damage to five areas. (The monastery simply lacks the precision climate control needed to preserve the ikon.)

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