The Real Russia. Today.

The Cohen-McFaul debate, Russia's open-ended ‘counter-sanctions,’ and Ambassador Huntsman's awkward date

Friday, May 11, 2018

• Meduza summarizes a debate between Stephen Cohen and Michael McFaul about who's to blame for the new U.S.-Russian Cold War
• Lawmakers amend proposed counter-sanctions to give Putin more leeway
• U.S. sanctions have cost Oleg Deripaska three private jets
• Ambassador Huntsman will attend the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, where he'll join a panel with sanctioned billionaire Victor Vekselberg
• Families in Kemerovo say the co-owner of the mall that burned down hasn't followed through on a promise to pay compensation
• A journalist leaves the Presidential Human Rights Council, after it refuses to investigate Cossack vigilantes in Moscow
• The State Duma wants to hire former Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin
• Russia loses another Eurovision Song Contest
• The Magomedov brother get formal embezzlement charges
• Alexey Malobrodsky is recovering in an ICU, a day after a district court refused to transfer him to house arrest
• Tatiana Felgenhauer's attacker is sentenced to psychiatric treatment
• Moscow's legal system tells Telegram to resubmit

Uncle Sam and the Motherland 🇷🇺💔🇺🇸

❄️🔥 Debating the New Cold War (aka the Hot Peace)

In a story for The New York Times Magazine published on May 8, Keith Gessen profiled the “Russia hands” who currently run the show in Washington. One of the article’s many payoff paragraphs comes when Gessen explains that these experts “divide less along party lines than along foreign-policy philosophies” and the prevailing group is a “vast internationalist middle” that excludes only “tiny slices” of “hard realists” on the right and “soft realists” on the left. For the “small contingent of dissidents” who haven’t become hawks, it’s now about “keeping a low profile.”

Living in New York City, retired from academia, and unencumbered by the Washington consensus on Russia, Professor Stephen Cohen does not keep a low profile. In recent years, he has been one of America’s most vocal “dissidents” when it comes to the nation’s Russia policies. On Wednesday, May 9, Cohen visited the Harriman Institute at Columbia University to debate Stanford Professor and former Ambassador Michael McFaul, who is currently promoting his new book “From Cold War to Hot Peace.” Gessen describes McFaul as “a Russophile” opposed to unilateralism who’s also “an avid internationalist and democracy promoter.” For almost two hours, Cohen and McFaul exchanged their very different views on America's Russia policy.

Read Meduza’s summary of the Cohen-McFaul debate: “Is Russia or America to blame for the New Cold War?”

💸 Fuzzy Wuzzy had a counter-sanction

Russia’s answer to the U.S. “oligarch sanctions” just got a little fuzzier. According to an amended draft of legislation authorizing various “counter-sanctions,” the State Duma is no longer presenting the government with a list that specifies which imported goods to ban in retaliation.

The draft law initially mentioned medicines, food, tobacco, and alcohol. A second reading leaked by the political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann drops this language in favor of an open-ended endorsement allowing the president to ban any products or raw materials that are not vital goods unavailable in Russia.

Lawmakers will vote on the legislation on May 15, but they’ll be voting on the draft law’s first reading. Attending a committee meeting at the Duma, Schulmann got her hands on a copy of the second reading.

🛩 Hard times for Deripaska

Do you have $90 million lying around? If so, you could become the proud owner of the three private jets Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska just stopped leasing, due to U.S. sanctions imposed on him in April. “He’s sanctioned, his companies are sanctioned, he has to return the aircraft. He has to early-terminate the leases, under sanctions rules,” the director of the aviation sales company that listed the planes told Reuters.

• Read the story at Reuters.

😅 St. Pete's most awkward panel

U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman says he will attend the St. Petersburg Economic Forum later this month, becoming the first American official to speak at the conference since Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014. He is scheduled to join Victor Vekselberg, the sanctioned Russian billionaire, on a panel to discuss business in the face of “complications in bilateral political relations.” “We have a lot of American businesses who [sic] are going to be there,” Huntsman said, explaining his attendance.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators have reportedly questioned Vekselberg about hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments his company's U.S. affiliate made to President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, after the election, according to a source familiar with the matter. Both the purpose of the payments, which predate the sanctions, and the nature of the business relationship between Vekselberg and Cohen remain unclear.

Keremovo's missing money 💰

When a fire burned down a shopping center in Kemerovo on March 25, killing 60 people (including 40 children), one of the mall’s co-owners, Denis Shtengelov, promised to pay 3 million rubles ($48,675) to each of the families that lost people in the blaze. According to Igor Vostrikov, whose entire family died in the fire, Shtengelov still hasn’t paid out a kopeck, though the regional government has followed through on 1-million-ruble ($16,230) compensations.

Vostrikov says the government money was deducted from state employees, though spokespeople for the governor’s office insist that these single-day wages were donated “voluntarily.” Regional officials say the government and Shtengelov finished paying out compensations on May 10.

The Cossacks were the final straw ✊

The journalist Maxim Shevchenko says he’s had enough of the Presidential Human Rights Council. He’s calling it quits, after the organization ignored his calls for an inquiry into the Cossack groups that attacked anti-Putin protesters on May 5. Shevchenko says the council’s “supervising bureaucracy” has lost interest in fulfilling its mission. “We tried to do a lot of important things, but in the end we accomplished almost nothing at all,” Shevchenko said on Ekho Moskvy on Thursday.

“I make no common cause with [Alexey] Navalny or his political views, but the beating of Muscovites by some bandits in downtown Moscow and [Kremlin spokesman Dmitry] Peskov saying that the Kremlin hasn’t received any complaints about this shows that we’re dealing with an open and deliberate sabotage [...]. I don’t want a part in this theater,” Shevchenko said.

Some of the men dressed as Cossacks who beat up protesters at a May 5 anti-Putin rally may be on Moscow City Hall’s payroll, according to the newsletter The Bell. For the past three years, their “army” has received 15.9 million rubles (more than $255,000) in public funds for services that include “ensuring public security during mass events.”

Kudrin gets a job offer 🤙

The State Duma wants to nominate former Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin to take over as head of Russia’s Accounts Chamber, the agency responsible for auditing the federal government. Kudrin, who has chaired a think tank since 2016 that develops economic plans for key Russian economic sectors, says he’ll let the Duma know by May 14 if he wants the job.

Another year without Eurovision glory 🎤

The competition isn’t over yet, but Russia has already lost the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest. Last year, Ukrainian officials refused to allow Yulia Samoylova to visit Kiev, in light of her trip to post-annexation Crimea in 2015. Samoylova is known for her music and for the spinal muscular atrophy that has confined her to a wheelchair since she was a child.

This year, Ukraine’s representative is one of the finalists in Portugal. The other remaining contestants are performers from Serbia, Moldova, Hungary, Sweden, Australia, Norway, Denmark, Slovakia, and Holland.

Charges against the brothers who robbed Russia's World Cup ⚽️

Russia’s Interior Ministry has charged the Magomedov brothers, who own the “Summa” conglomerate, with organizing a criminal network to embezzle government funds. Artur Maxidov, the former head of the company “Intex,” faces the same charges.

Investigators say they’ve identified six instances of fraud and embezzlement that cost the state an estimated 2.5 billion rubles ($40.6 million). Two of these cases allegedly involved the construction of soccer stadiums for the 2018 FIFA World Cup — one in Kaliningrad and another in St. Petersburg. According to the newspaper Kommersant, police plan to indict a handful of other businessmen suspected of acting as accomplices in these crimes.

Artur Maxidov and both Magomedovs maintain their innocence, pointing out that they actually reported to police one of the crimes they supposedly committed.

Coming back to haunt 🏥

A day after a Moscow district court refused to transfer Alexey Malobrodsky to house arrest, he’s recovering at a hospital in intensive care. Malobrodsky’s doctor says he likely suffered either a heart attack or acute heart failure in the courtroom, after telling prosecutors, “This attempted murder will come back to haunt you.” Paramedics were called to the court, but he wasn’t brought to the hospital for another three hours. After a night in a hospital bed, police finally removed Malobrodsky’s handcuffs.

Prosecutors asked the court to reject the transfer request by state investigators, dismissing claims by Malobrodksy’s lawyer that his client’s health has deteriorated in pretrial detention. The court rejected a similar petition by investigators on April 27.

The former director of the Gogol Center, Malobrodksy was arrested last summer for his suspected involvement in the embezzling of state funding in the “Seventh Studio” case. He is the only suspect still in pretrial detention. The other suspects now under house arrest are stage director Kirill Serebrennikov, Russian Academic Youth Theater director Sofia Apfelbaum, Seventh Studio general director Yuri Itin, and former Seventh Studio head accountant Nina Maslyaeva. Producer Ekaterina Voronova fled Russia and is wanted by police. Maslyaeva is the only suspect who has confessed to the charges.

Felgenhauer's attacker is sent to the shrinks 👨‍⚕️

The Moscow Presensky District Court has sentenced the man who nearly murdered the journalist Tatiana Felgenhauer to mandatory psychiatric treatment. Boris Grits, a paranoid schizophrenic with citizenship in both Russia and Israel, was found mentally unfit to stand trial. His lawyers say they will petition to have Grits transferred to Israel for treatment.

Boris Grits stabbed Felgenhauer in the neck on October 23, 2017, after pepper-spraying the guard at the radio station Ekho Moskvy. Felgenhauer was hospitalized until November 3, and within two weeks of the attack she was back on the air. Grits told police that she had “harassed him telepathically” since 2012.

Try again, Telegram ⚖️

Moscow’s Tagansky District Court has decided to take no immediate action on Telegram’s complaint against an April 13 ruling that authorized the federal censor to block the instant messenger in Russia. The court gave Telegram until June 4 to sort out the problems with its challenge, which it says should be submitted as a formal appeal along with a payment of all court fees, instead of the private complaint filed by the company’s lawyers.

According to the human rights advocate Pavel Chikov, whose “Agora” organization is representing Telegram, the company is within its rights to challenge the April 13 ruling through a private complaint. Chikov also accuses Moscow’s courts of having “insufficient knowledge of substantive and procedural law.”

Yours, Meduza