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The Real Russia. Today.
Yekaterinburg loses mayoral elections, Vkontakte strikes a curious deal, and Aman Tuleyev won't go away
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
- Yekaterinburg abolishes mayoral elections
- Mail.ru Group strikes a deal to let a credit history bureau mine Vkontakte users' profiles
- Prosecutors want a woman imprisoned for 18 months for private photos
- Two Russian treason suspects sign partial plea bargains
- A cadet in St. Petersburg arrested for terrorist plans is ruled unfit to stand trial
- Aman Tuleyev doesn't know how to retire
- “Nastya Rybka” could be headed back home from Thailand
- Russia opens a new criminal case against Ukraine's interior minister
- FSB agents arrest a group suspected of trying to leak classified military maps
- Russia's Finance Ministry says almost all state procurement purchases are non-competitive
- Meduza looks at how girls in Russia with eating disorders are abusing drugs and faking prescriptions
Story of the day: Mayoral elections are abolished in Yekaterinburg 🗳
A day after a protest in the capital, legislators in the Sverdlovsk regional parliament adopted a third and final reading of a law that abolishes the direct election of Yekaterinburg's mayor. Proposed by Governor Evgeny Kuivashev, the legislation won the support of 42 deputies, with just four deputies opposing the law. Instead of the popular vote, Yekaterinburg’s mayor will now be selected by city deputies from a list of candidates determined by a “competition committee.” There were also plans to vote on legislation that would have preserved Yekaterinburg’s mayoral elections, but the author of the bill withdrew it shortly before Tuesday’s vote.
The rise and fall of Evgeny Roizman
The abolition of mayoral elections in Yekaterinburg effectively marks the end of Evgeny Roizman’s future in government. Perhaps the only independent mayor in the country, Roizman took office in September 2013 and was due to run for re-election this September. For years, he has been at odds with Governor Kuivashev, both politically and personally. Roizman addressed the regional parliament before it voted to end his city’s mayoral elections. In his remarks, he argued that Yekaterinburg’s mayor has already lost most of his administrative powers to the appointed “city manager” position, and said the ostensible justification for abolishing elections (to save the government 150 million rubles, or $2.6 million, in election costs once every five years) is a lousy reason to deprive the public of its “only chance to participate in the city’s political life.” Roizman says he doesn’t plan to try to seek re-election through the new undemocratic system.
A landmark data-mining agreement in Russia 👷♂️
Mail.ru Group says it will allow the National Bureau of Credit History (NBKI) to analyze borrowers’ public profiles on Vkontakte. NBKI currently has more than 200 million credit history records on at least 84 million Russian citizens, and more than 4,000 companies use the bureau’s services. According to Mail.ru Group — which owns Vkontakte (97 million monthly visitors), Odnoklassniki (71 million monthly visitors), and Moi Mir (9.2 million monthly visitors) — NBKI will only get access to Vkontakte users’ public profile data. The bureau can use this information to provide services to third parties, a source told the magazine RBC. Mail.ru Group has refused to disclose the terms of the deal.
Didn’t Vkontakte just sue somebody to stop this? Sort of. Earlier this year, Vkontakte won a appeal against the company “Double Data,” after that company started collecting and analyzing public user data for commercial use by banks without Vkontakte’s permission. NBKI was actually one of Double Data’s clients and originally acted as a second defendant in Vkontakte’s lawsuit, but in August 2017 it reached a settlement with the social network.
And here's another reason to be careful what you post on Vkontakte 🤭
Prosecutors are asking a court to sentence an activist from a banned protest movement to 18 months in prison on charges of hate speech. The evidence against Oksana Pokhodun is a private photo album she maintained on a Vkontakte account she registered under a pseudonym, where she says she collected “different marginal Internet memes” from July 2015 to May 2016. The album, Pokhodun says, was visible only to her account. The police say the images in the album qualify as illegal hate speech.
What’s this “banned protest movement”? The founder of ”Artpodgotovka,” Vyacheslav Maltsev, was arrested in absentia after fleeing Russia in July 2017. He is charged with inciting extremism. In October 2017, Russia banned his political movement as an extremist organization. Since 2013, Maltsev repeated many times that Russia would experience a revolution on November 5, 2017, calling on his supporters to occupy city centers across the country and refused to disperse, until Vladimir Putin resigned the presidency.
Two accused traitors are ready to deal ⚖️
Two of the four suspects in a Russian treason case, including a former agent in the FSB’s Information Security Center, have reportedly signed plea bargains where they confess to transferring data to foreign intelligence agencies. Three sources have confirmed to the magazine RBC that former FSB agent Dmitry Dokuchaev and entrepreneur Georgy Fomchenkov reached deals with prosecutors.
What did they confess? One of RBC’s sources says the two suspects claim to have shared information with foreign intelligence agencies “informally,” denying that there was anything criminal about the exchange. Dokuchaev and Fomchenkov allegedly say they were only trying to help punish cyber-criminals operating outside Russia and therefore outside their jurisdiction. Lawyers for the two suspects refused to comment on the story.
What’s the effect of the plea bargain? As a result of the plea bargains, the two men’s trials will be fast-tracked in a special procedure where the evidence collected against them isn’t reviewed. Dokuchaev and Fomchenkov will also face lighter sentences — no more than two-thirds of Russia’s maximum 20-year sentence for treason, says one of RBC’s sources.
How did these cyber-threat figures end up accused of treason?
According to one theory, the arrests could be part of an investigation into a DDoS attack on the “Assist” electronic payment system in July 2010, which prevented Aeroflot customers from buying e-tickets for several days. A court later convicted Pavel Vrublevsky, the founder of the competing “Chronopay” payment system, of orchestrating the attack, and sentenced him to two and a half years in prison. Mikhailov and Dokuchaev worked on that case with help from Kaspersky Lab.
After Mikhailov and the three others were arrested in December 2016, Vrublevsky told the newspaper Kommersant that he’d gone to the feds back in 2010 and warned them about “illegal activities” by this group that “might qualify as treason.”
Citing its own sources, the newsletter The Bell, meanwhile, has reported that Mikhailov and the others may have leaked information about Russian hacker attacks against the Democratic Party in the U.S. in the spring of 2016, pointing out that the FBI and NSA published a joint report at the end of that year accusing Moscow of orchestrating hacker attacks against American political targets in an effort to meddle in the U.S. presidential election.
St. Petersburg's terrorist cadet is unwell 🤕
A year ago, the authorities detained a cadet at a military space academy in St. Petersburg, after discovering his hand-written plan to seize the barracks in a terrorist attack. This week, experts diagnosed Vadim Osipov with schizophrenia and determined that he is unfit to stand trial. Osipov is being remanded to a psychiatric ward, and his case will be reopened if he recovers. After his arrest in April 2017, Osipov wrote a letter to Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu where he said his supposed “terrorist plans” were just a mental exercise, in which he tried to map the barracks’s weak points.
Gone but not forgotten, and also not gone 🐇🎩
Despite resigning from Kemerovo’s governorship over the weekend, Aman Tuleyev isn’t leaving politics. On Monday, reporters learned that Tuleyev will maintain the title of “honorary governor,” which provides him with a continued monthly salary and use of the official regional residence. On Tuesday, April 3, one of the deputies in the Kemerovo regional parliament surrendered his seat to Tuleyev. According to the newspaper Kommersant, the head of the parliament, Alexey Sinitsyn, is expected to step down next week, so Tuleyev can take over as speaker. Aman Tuleyev is 73 years old and served as Kemerovo’s governor for more than two decades.
Owning up to get out of Thailand 🇹🇭🇧🇾
Anastasia Vashukevich and Alexander Kirillov, the Belarusian “sex trainers” better known as “Nastya Rybka” and “Alex Leslie,” have reportedly agreed to plead guilty to disrespecting the culture and religion of Thailand, the penalty for which is deportation and banishment from the country for at least 10 years. Another five of the eight “sex tourists” arrested with Vashukevich and Kirillov have also decided to confess. Their trial could begin as soon as April 11, a lawyer defending Vashukevich and Kirillov told the news agency RIA Novosti.
Vashukevich and Kirillov are currently the targets of a lawsuit in Russia by billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who accuses the pair of divulging details of his private life without his permission. In August 2016, Deripaska invited Vashukevich onto his yacht, where she photographed him and Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Prikhodko in the company of several supposed “escorts.” Anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny drew attention to the photos earlier this year, suggesting that Deripaska and Prikhodko may have discussed interference in the U.S. presidential election.
Another criminal case against Ukraine's top cop 🇺🇦🇷🇺
Russia’s Federal Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case against Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, charging him with willfully obstructing the work of Russian election commissions. On March 18, Avakov instructed the Ukrainian police officers guarding Russian diplomatic institutions in Kiev, Lviv, Odessa, and Kharkiv not to let through Russian citizens, in order to prevent them from voting in the presidential election. Not only were Russian citizens blocked from entering their embassy and consulates, but Ukrainian nationalist groups staged demonstrations outside these buildings. The maximum penalty for obstructing election work is five years in prison.
This isn’t the first Russian criminal case against Avakov. A Russian court has already arrested Avakov in absentia. In 2014, investigators charged him and then Dnepropetrovsk Governor Ihor Kolomoyskyi with organizing murders, waging illegal warfare, kidnapping, and obstructing the work of journalists.
Forbidden military maps 🗺
Federal Security Agents raided homes in Yekaterinburg, Simferopol, and Omsk on Tuesday, detaining three Russians and one Ukrainian citizen on charges of trying to sneak abroad classified topographical maps of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. Officials haven’t revealed the suspects' names, but they could face charges of treason and espionage.
Reign of the no-bid procurement contract 🤝
According to a new report by the Finance Ministry, more than 96 percent of all purchases by Russian state companies and government enterprises in 2017 were made outside a competitive process. The Finance Ministry reviewed more than 5,000 options state companies have when making purchases and found that only three qualify as competitive: bidding, auctions, and requests for quotes. In 2016, the Finance Ministry found that 95 percent of all state purchases were made under non-competitive circumstances.
The biggest spenders among Russian state companies in 2017 were Rosneft and its affiliates (with 7.7 trillion rubles, or $133.7 billion), and the Russian Railways (with 1.3 trillion rubles, or $22.6 billion).
It’s not as bad as it seems. Several experts told the magazine RBC that purchases aren’t necessarily noncompetitive just because the Finance Ministry says they are. For instance, purchases from a single supplier, which the report considers to be non-competitive, are often the only option, especially when it comes to certain high-tech products with few suppliers on the market.
The slow suicide of Russian women with eating disorders 💊
In April 2017, Meduza published a story about the life of Russians suffering from eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). There aren’t reliable statistics measuring the number of these people in Russia, but even the most conservative estimates put their population at more than 10,000. One of the most important aspects in this problem is the abuse of medicine. Diuretics and antidepressants weren’t developed to cause weight loss, but many young women (the most common victims of eating disorders) are turning to these drugs for precisely this reason, leading to serious health risks. In a special report for Meduza, Maina Vasilieva, a journalist from the website Delovoi Peterburg, looks at how girls in Russia with eating disorders are abusing drugs and faking prescriptions.
Yours, Meduza