The Real Russia. Today.

Putin's expensive new orders, Moscow's sensitive Cossacks, and Russia's shopping death traps

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

• Vladimir Putin issues another set of executive orders, and it'll cost billions of dollars to implement them
• Medvedev proposes his next cabinet
• A Cossack spokesman says anti-Putin protesters hurt his feelings
• Russia's federal censor targets a dangerous prognosticator
• Roskomnadzor unblocks several million Google IP addresses
• Telegram appeals a Russian Supreme Court ruling
• Bellingcat says it has proof that the Russian military helped shell Mariupol in 2015
• The Justice Ministry registers a new “foreign agent”
• In the past several weeks, Russia has shut down almost a third of its shopping malls for safety violations
• Moscow's Victory Day parade will showcase some new military hardware

Meet Putin 4.0 🆕

✍️ Another set of “May orders”

After his inauguration on Monday, Vladimir Putin signed executive orders instructing his cabinet to make a series of national improvements by the end of his current term in 2024: raise Russia’s life expectancy to 78 years (it’s now 72.5 years), make Russia the world’s fifth biggest economy (it’s now the sixth), and cut the number of Russians living in poverty in half (there are currently 22 million Russians living below the poverty line). Putin also ordered the government to improve housing conditions for at least 5 million families every year.

In May 2012, at the start of his third presidential term, Putin issued several presidential decrees, setting major goals for his administration over the next six years. In late April, Bloomberg reported that Putin is planning a 10 trillion-ruble ($162-billion) increase in spending on health care, education, and infrastructure. On May 8, Dmitry Medvedev told the magazine RBC that Putin’s new “May orders” would cost 8 trillion rubles ($126.4 billion) to implement.

🔀 Reshuffling the deck chairs

Acting Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has proposed a new cabinet and he wants to appoint Finance Minister Anton Siluanov to serve as his first deputy prime minister. Here’s Medvedev’s wish list of deputy prime ministers and their would-be assignments:

• Dmitry Kozak — industry and energy
• Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov — the defense industry complex (which used to be Dmitry Rogozin’s job)
• Former Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko — construction and regional policy
• Former Health and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova — social policy and healthcare
• Former Deputy Prime Minister for Social Affairs Olga Golodets — culture and sports
• Former Voronezh Governor and former Agriculture Minister Alexey Gordeyev — agriculture
• Deputy government chief of staff Maxim Akimov — transportation, communications, and the digital economy
• Presidential advisor Konstantin Chiuchenko — chief of Medvedev’s staff (which used to be Sergey Prikhodko’s job)

Sergey Prikhodko was caught up in the scandal that followed Alexey Navalny’s February publication of evidence that he met with billionaire Oleg Deripaska aboard a yacht ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. There were several self-described “escorts” on the boat, one of whom later shared photographs from the trip.

Medvedev’s list leaves out several long-time deputy prime ministers: Igor Shuvalov (since 2008), Arkady Dvorkovich (since 2012), and Alexander Khloponin (since 2010).

Why “acting” prime minister? Putin’s cabinet resigned on May 7 ahead of his inauguration — a formality at the start of his new presidential term. Later in the day, Putin made Medvedev acting prime minister, and the State Duma is expected to approve the appointment on May 8.

Cossacks have feelings, too ✊

Vasily Yashchikov, a spokesman for the Cossack group “The First Hundred,” said in an interview with the newspaper Kommersant that opposition protesters intentionally provoked the Cossacks who attended Saturday’s anti-Putin demonstration. Yashchikov says members of The First Hundred went to the rally “just to observe and talk,” and he says he even had “decent conversations” with Alexey Navalny and “Open Russia” chairman Andrey Pivovarov, before “these young guys” supposedly started “insulting” the Cossacks. “I think this was the goal: to provoke the Cossacks into fights, and then to write that they were paid by the state,” Yashchikov said.

What actually happened on Saturday? Video footage from Moscow’s May 5 rally shows how members of several Cossack groups attacked protesters with their fists and with whips, while police did nothing. The Cossack groups identified at the demonstration were The First Hundred, the “Central Cossack Battalion,” the “Crimean Cossack Regiment,” and “The First Consolidated Officers’ Ranger Hundred.” Journalists later discovered that the Central Cossack Battalion has contracts with the city worth several hundred thousand dollars to “ensure public safety during mass events.”

That sensational federal censor 🤯

✨ Illegal horoscopes

Roskomnadzor’s failure to block the instant messenger Telegram apparently hasn’t stopped it from doing other important censorship work around the country. Earlier this month, for instance, the agency reportedly sued a man for publishing a prediction two days ahead of the March 18 presidential election saying that Vladimir Putin would win the race. A court apparently agreed that the prediction violated Russia’s embargo on publishing polling data within five days of Election Day and issued a small fine. The suspect in this case is an astrologist living in Kaliningrad, and he says the charges were brought against him in Vladivostok — at the other end of the country.

The news website Mediazona, which covers Russia’s justice system, was unable to confirm the details of this story with Roskomnadzor’s office in Vladivostok, and the court hasn’t yet published the May 7 ruling. So far, these reports are based on what Alexander Rempel, the astrologist in question, has told journalists. Rempel told Primamedia.ru that he plans to write Roskomnadzor’s horoscope next.

🤨 Finally they admit it

Roskomnadzor admits that its actions against Telegram have caused some collateral damage. The agency’s representatives told the news agency Interfax on Monday that 400 websites have been disrupted, and it is working locally to restore Internet service to the affected online services.

Since April 16, after Telegram refused to surrender its encryption keys to federal agents, Roskomnadzor has blocked millions IP addresses in an effort to cut off access to the instant messenger. Telegram is still working fine for most Russians, but the blocking of popular cloud services has caused widespread online mayhem.

On May 8, Roskomnadzor removed six Google subnets from its Internet blacklist, unblocking 3.7 million IP addresses.

⚖️ Telegram challenges Russia's Supreme Court

Telegram’s lawyers have filed an appeal against the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Federal Security Service’s demands that the instant messenger surrender the encryption keys for all users. Telegram insists that the FSB’s request violates Russians’ right to privacy of correspondence. The federal government says no it doesn’t.

Another Bellingcat bombshell 🇺🇦💥🇷🇺

The Bellingcat investigation team says it’s determined “conclusively” that an artillery attack in January 2015 on the Ukrainian town of Mariupol (which killed at least 30 civilians and injured more than 100 people) “came from Russia-controlled territory.” The open-source investigators also say the shelling operation was “instructed, directed, and supervised by Russian military commanders in active service with the Russian Defense Ministry.” Bellingcat claims to have identified nine Russian officers (including one general, two colonels, and three lieutenant colonels) involved directly with the military operation.

• Read the story at Bellingcat.

Hey they asked for it 👮‍♂️

The Justice Ministry has registered the “Jailed Russia” Foundation as a foreign agent at the organization’s own request. “Since 2018, we’ve started receiving money from the European Commission to create a network of legal clinics” for free legal advice, Jailed Russia founder Olga Romanova told the news agency Interfax. Russia’s law on “foreign agents” has been on the books since 2012.

Since 2017, Romanova has lived in Germany, leaving Moscow after the State Penitentiary Service accused Jailed Russia of misappropriating funds allocated by the World Bank for staging lectures in prisons on financial literacy.

A shopping disaster 🛍

Inspections carried out by the Emergency Situations Ministry after March’s deadly fire in Kemerovo have led to the temporary closure of almost a third of all shopping centers in Russia, according to the newspaper Kommersant. Almost half of the closed malls are relatively small shopping areas built or last remodeled in the 1990s. Sources told the newspaper that the closures could cost businesses more than half a billion rubles ($7.9 million) a month in lost revenues.

Business owners in Khabarovsk and Ulyanovsk are organizing and demanding that the federal government provide a schedule for follow-up inspections with the promise that shopping centers can reopen, if they remove any safety code violations.

On March 25, a fire at a shopping center in Kemerovo killed 60 people, including 40 children. The mall was apparently riddled with fire safety violations, and Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry announced a series of nationwide inspections after the tragedy. In mid-April, the agency said it had discovered fire-safety violations at half of the shopping centers it inspected.

A-ten-hut! 📺

Moscow’s May 9 Victory Day parade isn’t all about rolling terrifying ICBMs through the streets of the capital. This year, for the first time ever, the country will also get a look at the military’s new all-terrain vehicles and machine-gun-mounted UAZ-Patriot trucks. Wednesday will also be Russians’ chance to see Berkut snowmobiles and Typhoon armored vehicles. Also for the first time, the military will parade its Katran and Corsair drones.

According to the VTsIOM polling center, 65 percent of Russians watch Moscow’s Victory Day parade on television.

Yours, Meduza