The Real Russia. Today.

Americans debate what to do in Ukraine about a potential Russian invasion

Monday, November 22, 2021

• In quest of a monopoly on the term ‘foreign agent,’ state-owned RT goes after a small clothing brand that partnered with Meduza
• Censorship: RKN demands local offices from big tech and flags RFE/RL for critique of Stalinist wartime policy, and a ‘toxic registry’ is under consideration
• Opinions on a looming, expanded war in Ukraine: Kimmage, Kofman, Trenin, and Charap
• International news: Rosenberg interviews Lukashenko, U.S. intel sounds alarm over Russian military buildup, and the Kursk disaster is rehashed
• New focus-group study tests prevailing wisdom about ‘the Putin Generation’
• Tatarstan becomes the first Russian region to introduce vaccine passport requirements for accessing public transportation
• Public policy: Alexey Goreslavsky’s new job
• The rationale behind the Russian authorities’ attempt to liquidate the human rights group Memorial is absurd (even by its own logic)
• Law and order: Trudolyubov on Memorial, Chechnya wants race-blind reporting, Rashin’s reckoning is Thursday, another journalist flees to Georgia, and two non-experts fuel the case against Memorial

Censorship

™️ Russia Today vs. Russia’s free press: Pressure for pressure’s sake (12-min read)

The state media holding RT (Russia Today) is trying to obtain a legal monopoly on the Russian term for “foreign agent.” The television network trademarked “inostranny agent” in 2020, and late this spring it moved to patent its shortened form, “inoagent.” In October, RT’s lawyers sent a claim letter to a small brand that put the words “innostranny agent” on a t-shirt. The Moscow-based Feelosophy Store had launched a line merch in support of Meduza — and it’s just one of many small companies that have brought out foreign-agent themed products to express support for NGOs and media outlets blacklisted under this label. If Russian courts side with RT, only the state-run television network will be able to sell t-shirts, keychains, stickers, and other products featuring this term. That said, some lawyers believe that RT’s intellectual property rights could be disputed. To find out more, Meduza takes a deep dive into RT’s quest to privatize this repressive “brand” created by the Russian state.

More censorship news

• 🛑 Roskomnadzor releases list of I.T. companies required to open local Russian offices by January 1(it includes Google, Apple, Meta, Twitter, TikTok, Apple, Telegram, Zoom, Spotify, Discord, Twitch, and others, and would make these businesses’ operations in Russia more vulnerable to local police pressure)
• 🛑 Roskomnadzor flags Radio Svoboda article for referring to Stalinist wartime execution orders as ‘draconian and sinister’ (the agency objects to this description of infamous instructions from Georgy Zhukov in September 1941 to execute the families of Red Army soldiers who allowed themselves to be captured during WWII)
• 🏳️‍🌈 Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council to consider endorsing ‘registry of toxic content’ in quasi-civic effort to suppress LGBT rights, feminism, and more (a businessman named Igor Ashmanov is trying to sell the advisory group on a campaign to police Russia’s “gray zone” of supposedly harmful speech)

International

🇺🇦 Opinion: Russia might invade more of Ukraine soon, and here’s how to confront this threat

In an article for Foreign Affairs, scholars Michael Kimmage and Michael Kofman say Russia is willing to fight to reverse Ukraine’s pro-Western drift, and the West needs to articulate its redlines and potential military role to give Kyiv “full awareness of the geopolitical reality.” Russia’s current “force posture” is “well outside the normal training cycle” and suggests that an invasion could occur soon but not imminently (likely not with the aim of conquering the whole country, but either to divide Ukraine in two or impose a new settlement on Kyiv to reduce its Euro-Atlantic integration).

Moscow’s redline in Ukraine has shifted from membership in NATO to “opposing the growing structural Ukrainian defense cooperation with [Russia’s] Western adversaries.” Russian faith in a political solution to Kyiv’s drift has vanished along with all cooperation with the Zelensky administration, just as Moscow has gained leverage over Europe in the gas market and as the Biden administration has tried to pivot from challenging Russia in Europe to countering China globally, reducing Ukraine to “a secondary interest within a secondary theater.”

Russia seeks a regional order where Moscow has equal say on security outcomes in Europe. The United States has been “visibly absent from the diplomatic process” here, and Washington needs to realize that its reputation is on the line (again), not to mention the prospect of a major war on European soil. Washington should make the consequences of an invasion clear to Moscow, which requires closer “anticipatory coordination” with America’s European allies and could ideally raise the expected economic and political costs of military action for Russia enough to lower the odds of war. Additionally, Washington must tell Kyiv (“privately and candidly”) what to expect militarily from Uncle Sam, so Ukrainian leaders “can operate with a full awareness of the geopolitical reality.”

🇺🇦 Opinion: Moscow will not tolerate Ukraine as a ‘U.S.-controlled unsinkable aircraft carrier parked on Russia’s border’

In an article published at the Carnegie Moscow Center (available in English, but not yet in Russian), director Dmitri Trenin says Vladimir Putin is now relying on Russian military maneuvers as the Kremlin’s primary signaling medium to the West about tensions in Ukraine.

Trenin recalls the lack of de-escalation by Kyiv and the West in the region, referring to HMS Defender incident in the Black Sea in June, Ukrainian legislation denying “indigenous community” status to ethnic Russians, and legislative steps to leave the Minsk accords, Kyiv’s use of Turkish-made drones against separatists, an increased NATO presence, and U.S. strategic bombers allegedly flying within 13 miles of Russia. Trenin acknowledges that the Putin administration has “responded,” as well, allowing Donbas residents to vote in Russia’s fall elections, allowing government purchases of Donbas produce, ceasing coal deliveries to Ukraine, questioning Ukrainian statehood, and amassing troops. Trenin compares Kyiv’s military integration with NATO to Cuba’s alliance with the USSR, saying Putin or “any Russian leader” will “seek to prevent such anchorage, using whatever means they have at their disposal.”

Trenin says Putin currently hopes to “exploit the fruits of military deterrence that Putin is busy organizing” around Ukraine, vying for another summit with Biden. In the meantime, the risk that one side might try to “test whether the other side is bluffing” could lead to disaster.

🇺🇦 Opinion: American leverage over Russia is limited, but Washington could avert catastrophe by pushing Ukraine to follow through on concessions

In an article for Politico that provoked outrage from many Ukraine commentators on social media over the weekend (see Christopher Miller’s summary of the responses), political scientist Samuel Charap says Washington has untapped influence over Kyiv “to push for progress on the Donbas conflict,” pressuring Ukraine’s leadership to implement promises under the Minsk II agreement (unpopular concessions that he says could be undone later if Russia doesn’t reciprocate). Charap’s recommendations are based on the notion that America’s deterrence capacity in the region is limited: “the Biden administration should accept the unsatisfying reality that it will likely not be able to coerce Putin to de-escalate if he is determined to act.”

Critics accuse Charap of ignoring Ukrainian agency in his policy recommendations, but he argues that “the reality is that Ukraine depends on political, diplomatic, economic, and military support from the West, and particularly from the United States.” He admits the unpalatability of “pushing the victim to do the aggressor’s bidding” but notes that Russia has demonstrated its willingness to go “way further” than the West in Ukraine, meaning that Washington’s best shot at averting a war it likely won’t fight is to exert influence over Kyiv.

More international news

• 🧠 Watch BBC journalist Steve Rosenberg’s 25-minute interview with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko (the focus is the refugee crisis at the Polish border)
• 🚨 U.S. intelligence agencies reportedly warn European allies about Russia’s military buildup at Ukrainian border (sources told Bloomberg that Moscow has “called up tens of thousands of reservists on a scale unprecedented in post-Soviet times,” presumably to secure captured Ukrainian territory after an invasion beginning in late January or early February)
• 🔱 Former commander of Russia’s Northern Fleet repeats claim that Kursk submarine sunk in 2000 after colliding with NATO sub (Admiral Vyacheslav Popov says he’s “90-percent certain” but can offer no evidence. Russian investigators reviewed this version of events but concluded that a torpedo exploded on board the Kursk, triggering catastrophic ammo explosions. The Kursk disaster was one of the first mishandled crises in Vladimir Putin’s presidency.)

Public policy

🐣 A new sociological study: The next Russians (2-min read)

In a study of Russian youth attitudes for Carnegie Moscow Center, a research team led by Andrey Kolesnikov and Denis Volkov gathered a total of six focus groups in three cities (Moscow, Yaroslavl, and Bryansk), assembling two groups in each location, one comprising 18–25-year-olds and the other 30–35-year-olds. The project was designed, in part, to test speculation that a supposedly liberal-leaning, relatively oppositionist new generation of Russians will challenge the current regime’s grip on power. Kolesnikov and Volkov attribute the “myth” that young people drove pro-Navalny protests in January and February 2021 to the Kremlin’s own propaganda, arguing that the authorities used this narrative to depict the Navalny movement as an illegal enterprise, thus justifying a police crackdown. At the same time, however, the narrative betrayed the Kremlin’s own concerns about “losing” the next generation.

🛂 Vaccine passports in Kazan: Avoiding QR-code chaos (3-min read)

On Monday, November 22, Tatarstan became the first Russian region to require commuters to present QR codes documenting either vaccination against COVID-19 or a past diagnosis in order to access public transportation. And although local authorities tried to spread the word about the new rules ahead of time there was still some confusion. In the regional capital, Kazan, which is home to around 1.3 million people, huge crowds gathered at some bus stops as drivers and conductors checked QR codes before letting passengers on board.

More public-policy news

• 🌐 Kremlin’s former Internet agenda curator appointed CEO of state-supported Internet Development Institute (Alexey Goreslavsky says he plans to focus on public service messaging. Previously, he helped the Kremlin purge independent voices from Russia’s online news media.)

Law and order

⚖️ The Memorial crackdown: ‘The biggest threat in our 30-year history’ (11-min read)

In November, Russia’s prosecutor general filed a lawsuit to liquidate Memorial International — Russia’s oldest and most authoritative human rights organization. Memorial was accused of violating Russia’s legislation on “foreign agents” by failing to include the required labels on its materials. Almost all of Memorial’s alleged violations were reported to Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal censorship agency, by the FSB’s Ingushetia office. Meduza explains why that particular office has played such an important role in this story, and whether its complaints against Memorial are at all justified.

More law-and-order news

• ⚖️ Opinion: Case against Memorial shows how Russian authorities hold domestic ‘foreign agents’ as hostages in response to Western sanctions and criticism (Maxim Trudolyubov argues in an article for The Wilson Center that Russia’s “foreign agent” mania signals to the West: “You exert pressure on us, we exert pressure on your ‘agents’ inside Russia.” Persecuting Memorial particularly stings in the West because the group has complaints waiting in the ECHR and a long past in Germany.)
• ⚖️ Chechnya submits draft legislation that would ban Russian media from mentioning the nationality and religion of those involved in crimes (The bill follows reporting earlier this month about an attack against a Moscow resident that originally misidentified the assailants as North Caucasians. Attacks in Russia often attract public outrage when violence appears to occur along ethnic lines.)
• ⚖️ State Duma mandates commission recommends removing Valery Rashkin’s parliamentary immunity (the matter should go to the floor for a vote on Thursday, likely ending the career of the politician who until recently was a potential successor to Gennady Zyuganov as the Communist Party’s leader)
• 🛫 Another Russian journalist flees for Georgia (Readovka correspondent Vasily Krestyaninov left the country after the FSB reportedly threatened him and his loved ones, demanding his collaboration with unspecified investigative work)
• 🔎 The ‘expert evidence’ against Memorial is based on testimony from two incompetents(Natalia Kryukova and Alexander Tarasov, the two “psycho-linguistic experts” whose analysis fuels the entire “justifying terrorism and extremism” investigation are actually just an incompetent mathematician and translator who have served over the years as the authorities’ experts in religion, anthropology, and more in politicized cases, including the Pussy Riot trial)

☢️ Tomorrow in history: 15 years ago on November 23, 2006, Russian defector and former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko died in London from poisoning by polonium-210. In the 2021 case Carter v Russia, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia was responsible for his death and ordered the country to pay 100,000 euros in damages to his widow.

Yours, Meduza