The Real Russia. Today.

Navalny's seventh shot, Abramovich's visa problem, and Rotenburg's sweet deal

Monday, May 21, 2018

• Meduza reports on Russia's shopping-mall crackdown and the country's regular shortages of vital medicines
• Putin will reportedly ditch a live audience at this year's marathon televised ‘call-in’ show
• Navalny initiates his seventh attempt to register a political party, as one of his supporters in Chelyabinsk declares a hunger strike
• The billionaire Roman Abramovich is reportedly having trouble renewing his British visa
• The UK's censor opens three new investigations against RT
• ISIS claims responsibility for a church attack in Chechnya
• Russia is breaking out the electronic warfare tech to prevent drone strikes during the World Cup
• Former top FSB official dies in a helicopter crash
• New report says Russian teachers aren't earning what Putin promised
• It's a great time to sell VPN services to Russians
• A court arrests a suspect in the “Tor node” case that put a mathematician behind bars for months
• Sberbank analysts reportedly say Gazprom's new pipelines are a wash for everybody but the contractors
• A convicted Russian nationalist gets a retrial

Two Meduza special reports you could have read over the weekend

🛍 Shutting down Russia's shopping malls

On May 15, a demolition crew went to work on the charred wreckage of the “Winter Cherry” shopping center in Kemerovo, where 60 people (including 40 children) died in a fire on March 25. Following this tragedy, Russian fire safety officials launched unplanned inspections of shopping malls across the country. By early May, the authorities had shut down nearly a third of all the shopping centers in Russia, finding widespread noncompliance with federal fire safety standards. Meduza reviews this crackdown and looks at how badly many of the country’s malls failed to operate within fire codes.

• Read our special report: “Following a deadly fire in March, Russian fire safety officials have shut down a third of the country's shopping malls”

💊 Uncertain drug supplies

This week, Russian lawmakers adopted a first and second reading of legislation allowing the government to impose sweeping new “counter-sanctions” on hostile foreign states. The bill brings Moscow a step closer to banning the import of a whole series of vital medicines. Meduza asked gastroenterologist Alexey Paramonov, the director of the Rassvet Clinic, to explain Russia’s regular shortages of important pharmaceuticals.

• Read Paramonov’s explanation: “Why is it so hard to get needed medicines in Russia?”

Putin reportedly plans to ditch the live studio audience 🎙

Vladimir Putin’s marathon “direct line” call-in show is reportedly ditching its live audience, which Putin first introduced in 2008, when he left the presidency to serve as prime minister. Putin has held marathon call-in shows every year since 2001 (except in 2012). The Kremlin hasn’t yet verified any details about the next “direct line,” but it’s expected to take place on June 7, sources told the BBC’s Russian-language service.

Navalny tries to register a political party, again 🗳

The seventh time is a charm? Alexey Navalny’s supporters are trying once again to establish their own political party, and on Saturday they met at a business center in Moscow and held a founding convention for their new group, “Russia of the Future” — a reference to Navalny’s oft-used phrase “the beautiful Russia of the future,” which describes a Russia where anti-corruption reforms have been implemented.

Navalny didn’t attend the convention, as he is currently serving a 30-day jail sentence for organizing “unpermitted rallies” on May 5. Across the country, more than two dozen other Navalny supporters who were supposed to attend the convention were unable to come, because of jail sentences related to the May 5 demonstrations.

Navalny has been trying to register his own political party since 2012, but the Justice Ministry has repeatedly turned him away. Members of his previous project, the “Progress Party,” canceled their founding convention planned for March, after the former deputy head of Navalny’s presidential campaign teamed up with a notorious political strategist, Andrey Bogdanov, to steal the name. In 2013, Bogdanov helped steal the name of Navalny’s previous group, the “People’s Alliance.” Bogdanov is known for effectively “renting” parties registered by the Justice Ministry. Read more about him here.

🍽 One of Navalny's chapter heads calls a hunger strike

Boris Zolotarevsky, the head of Navalny’s local chapter in Chelyabinsk, is one of the activists now jailed for organizing anti-Putin demonstrations on May 5. On May 21, he declared a hunger strike to protest against poor living conditions in jail. According to the website Znak.com, another three prisoners who weren’t involved in the rallies have joined his hunger strike.

🇬🇧+🇷🇺

⚽️ Pip pip, cheerio, Roma

The UK is in no hurry to renew a visa issued to Roman Abramovich, which reportedly expired three weeks ago, forcing the billionaire to leave the country and skip Saturday’s FA Cup, where his soccer team Chelsea won 1-0. Sources told The Bell and RIA Novosti that Abramovich’s visa renewal hasn’t been denied, and British officials are still reviewing his extension application.

The UK grants “investment visas” to foreign citizens who invest at least 2 million pounds ($2.7 million) in the British economy. In March, following the poisoning of Sergey Skripal, Prime Minister Theresa May said the government would review its system of issuing visas to foreign investors. Then Home Secretary Amber Rudd said the audit would target 700 visas issued to Russian citizens between 2008 and 2015.

In a report published on May 21, titled “Moscow’s Gold: Russian Corruption in the UK,” the British Parliament said it might take up “the role of Tier 1 investor visas and the purchasing of EU and UK citizenship” and “other aspects of the UK sanctions regime.”

📺 We report. They investigate.

British media regulators at Ofcom have opened three new investigations into broadcasts from the Kremlin-funded television network *RT. The three new probes are in addition to seven existing “*impartiality investigations” into RT broadcasts about the poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal in March. The new investigations relate to broadcasts about Syria, Ukraine, and the UK, a person familiar with the matter told The Financial Times.

ISIS attacks a church in Chechnya ☦️

An Islamic terrorist group has claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack on a Russian Orthodox church in Grozny. According to the Site Intelligence Group, the Islamic State’s Caucasus Providence says four of its members armed themselves with guns, knives, and Molotov cocktails and killed two police officers and one parishioner. Responding police officers shot and killed all four terrorists. A witnesses says the attackers yelled “Allah Akbar!” during their assault. According to the website The Caucasian Knot, three of the ISIS members were local Chechen men and the fourth was from the neighboring republic of Ingushetia.

Drone defense at the World Cup 📻

To guard against drone attacks during this summer’s FIFA World Cup, the Russian military will deploy mobile electronic warfare stations in all 11 cities where games will take place between June 14 and July 15. By executive order, the Russian authorities will also be cracking down on alcohol sales and public demonstrations in host cities.

At the beginning of the year, Russia’s Khmeimim airbase in Syria suffered two drone attacks, reportedly damaging seven aircraft, though Moscow denies this information. The Russian Defense Ministry says the drones used in the attacks were too sophisticated to have been made without foreign assistance (suggesting that the U.S. military provided the technology).

A deadly fishing trip 🚁

Colonel General Anatoly Yezhkov, the former deputy director of Russia’s Federal Security Service, died early on May 21 in the Tuguro-Chumikansky District, after his helicopter crash-landed and caught fire. Three others on board survived and were hospitalized, with one of the men suffering a serious spinal injury. Yezhkov traveled to the area from Moscow for a fishing trip. Investigators have opened a criminal investigation into the incident, and are considering three possible scenarios: bad weather conditions, a technical malfunction, or pilot error.

Russian teachers' funny money 👩‍🏫

Contrary to a May 2012 executive order and a February 2018 declaration by the Education Ministry, a new report by the Labor Confederation of Russia and a teachers’ union says teachers’ salaries in Russia haven’t caught up to average regional salaries. The country’s current remuneration system ties part of teachers’ income to their work performance, but schools lack clear assessment criteria, “allowing officials to manipulate spending on education in accordance with the regional authorities’ priorities.” According to the report, this is why teachers in some regions earn four times more than teachers in other regions.

In April, the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration released a study showing that school teachers had largely managed to earn more money by working more double shifts.

Russia's VPN bonanza 🛰

Russia’s attempts to cut access to the instant messenger Telegram have been a boon to VPN services, as Internet users look for ways to circumvent Roskomnadzor’s censorship of millions of IP addresses. Over the past month, for instance, the American service TopGuard VPN says paid subscriptions jumped 1,000 percent. Other services like VyprVPN, CyberGhost, and PrivateVPN have reported similar spikes.

Roskomnadzor currently blocks 80 VPN and proxy services. The agency has unblocked another 10 services that agreed to stop allowing access to Telegram’s servers.

So that's who used Bogatov's Tor exit node? 💻

A Moscow district court has arrested Vladislav Kuleshov, a 33-year-old man living in Stavropol, on suspicion of using the Internet to incite terrorism and mass riots. The mathematician Dmitry Bogatov was once a suspect in the same criminal investigation, for which he spent several months in pretrial detention, before a public campaign helped pressure the authorities into transferring him to house arrest. In January 2018, Bogatov was released on his own recognizance, and in mid-May the charges against him were formally dropped.

Bogatov was arrested after someone used his Tor exit node to access an online social network to call for rioting at a protest in Moscow on April 2, 2017. He says he wasn’t even home when the comments were posted online from his IP address.

More bold claims from Sberbank's wonks 🤭

Two analysts at Sberbank CIB have reportedly concluded that the main beneficiaries of Russia’s export gas pipelines to China (the “Power of Siberia”) and Europe (“Nord Stream 2” and “TurkStream”) are the contractors hired to build the pipelines, not Gazprom or its shareholders. These contractors include Stroygazmontazh (owned by Arkady Rotenberg) and Stroytransneftegaz (half of which is owned by Gennady Timchenko and his family). Sberbank CIB’s analysts say Gazprom’s capital investments in these projects are unlikely to turn a profit, highlighting that the “Power of Siberia” is expected to cost $55 billion — 5.5 times more than a proposed alternative pipeline.

Last fall, Sberbank CIB removed from its report on Russia’s oil and gas sector a series of critical remarks about Rosneft and its CEO, Igor Sechin, redacting a whole paragraph titled “Rosneft: We Need to Talk About Igor.” Sberbank said the original report violated its “quality standards.”

Tesak will get another shot at freedom ⚖️

The Moscow City Court has overturned a 2017 conviction of the nationalist leader Maxim “Tesak” Martsinkevich, who was sentenced last July to nine years in prison for inciting hatred, robbery, and hooliganism. The case will be retried, during which time Martsinkevich will remain incarcerated. He was locked up for a series of vigilante attacks he and his followers carried out against suspected drug dealers. The 2017 verdict was Martsinkevich’s fourth conviction. He’s served prison time before for inciting ethnic hatred.

Yours, Meduza