The Real Russia. Today.
Russia sues Telegram (again), OPCW monitors arrive, and a Russian court actually acquits a man
Friday, April 6, 2018
- Russia gets closer to blocking Telegram
- OPCW monitors come to audit Russia
- Police crackdown on protest organizers and supportive local officials in two cities outside Moscow
- A human rights icon avoids a conviction for child pornography
- Crimean lawmakers want Russia to grant special perks to citizens of the separatist “republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk
- A prominent United Russia official says Kemerovo's ex-governor should retire for real
- Russians have little faith in their soccer team's FIFA World Cup chances
Story of the day: Russia takes another step toward blocking Telegram 📱
Russia’s federal censor, Roskomnadzor, has filed a lawsuit asking Moscow’s Tagansky District Court to block the popular instant messenger Telegram for violations of Russia’s information laws and for refusing to provide the Federal Security Service with the keys to decode all user correspondence.
Pavel Chikov, a lawyer for the “Agora” human rights group, which is representing Telegram, says the company’s position remains unchanged. “The FSB’s demands to provide access to users’ private correspondence are unconstitutional, legally unfounded, technically and legally unenforceable, and blocking the service is therefore unreasonable,” Chikov said on Friday.
Roskomnadzor previously gave Telegram until April 4 to comply with the FSB’s orders. The messenger’s representatives insist that Telegram’s core design means it doesn’t have access to its encryption keys, which are stored on users’ own devices. In December 2017, the service was fined 800,000 rubles ($13,840) for refusing to comply with Russia’s new anti-terrorist laws.
German Klimenko, President Putin’s advisor on Internet development, says Russians should switch to ICQ, if Telegram is blocked. Klimenko anticipates that as many as 90 percent of Telegram users in Russia would lose access to the messenger, if it’s blocked. In 2010, AOL sold ICQ to Mail.ru Group, which also owns the popular Russian social networks Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki. Unlike Telegram, these services regularly cooperate with Russian law enforcement, de-anonymizing users and providing evidence in many “extremism” prosecutions.
Foreign monitors come to Russia to inspect weapons facilities 🔬
Experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) audited facilities in Russia earlier this week, according to the Defense Ministry’s newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), though the specific locations of these inspections have not been reported. The publication also says a group of OSCE inspectors from Portugal recently visited Russia.
Mikhail Babich, the former head of Russia’s state commission on chemical weapons, has denied a report by The Times that the novichok nerve agent allegedly used to poison Sergey Skripal was manufactured at a laboratory in the city of Shikhany in the Saratov region. “We know where all the bases that stored chemical weapons were, and Shikhany wasn’t one of them,” Babich said, clarifying that such weapons were stored elsewhere in Saratov “but not in Shikhany.”
You've got protests, but they've got police raids 👮♂️
You don’t have to be an oil tycoon with designs on the presidency to trigger a police crackdown. Three small businessmen in Volokolamsk have helped organize protests against a landfill outside Moscow. Now two of them are behind bars and police have raided their offices.
- Read about Artem Lyubimov, Andrey Zhdanov, and Ramazan Bairamov: “The consultant, the cosmetologist, and the car washer”
And you don’t have to be a protest organizer to earn a visit from Johnny Law. This week, investigators, officers from an economic crimes police unit, and masked federal agents raided district administrative offices in Volokolamsk and Serpukhov, after officials issued permits for protests against local landfills. On April 14, when Moscow Governor Andrey Vorobyov celebrates his birthday, more than a dozen towns surrounding the capital will hold demonstrations against overflowing local trash dumps.
In Volokolamsk. On April 4, Moscow police came to the Volokolamsk administrative building and copied paperwork related to a water-supply facility built in 2017.
In Serpukhov. Police officers and six FSB agents wearing masks and bullet-proof vests raided the administrative building in Serpukhov on April 5, seizing documents from 2007 and 2008 about real-estate allocations for housing construction. Another 15 cops raided the “Nadezhda” Serpukhov Sports Palace, where protesters have a permit to stage a protest on April 14 against the “Lesnaya” garbage dump. Alexander Shestun, the head of the Serpukhov district, says the raids are tied to upcoming local elections, which were restored on April 5 after being abolished in 2015.
A Russian court actually doesn't convict someone of something ⚖️
In a rare acquittal, a court in Petrozavodsk found historian Yuri Dmitriev not guilty of producing child pornography. The Karelian head of the human rights group “Memorial” was, however, sentenced to 2.5 years probation for illegal weapons possession. Factoring in the time he’s already served during his trial and criminal investigation, Dmitriev will have to check in regularly with the police for another year and three months. Prosecutors wanted him locked up for nine years.
Investigators found nine nude photographs of Dmitriev’s adopted daughter on his computer. He says he used to images to track the girl’s health and to report to social services. There were hundreds of these photos on Dmitriev’s computer, but police built their case around just nine.
The human rights activist’s supporters say he’s being persecuted for his years of work to honor the local victims of Soviet political repressions. In 1997, he led an expedition that unearthed a mass grave containing the bodies of more than 9,000 people killed during the so-called Great Terror. He’s located several other mass graves, as well.
Get to work, rebels 🇺🇦🇷🇺
Federal lawmakers from Crimea have spearheaded new legislation introduced to the State Duma that would allow citizens of the unrecognized “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk to find work in Russia without formal permission. The law would equate residents “of certain areas in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine” to refugees or people with temporary asylum. The same group of lawmakers has also drafted legislation that would allow Donetsk and Luhansk “citizens” to remain in Russia until the conflict in Ukraine is resolved (they’re currently permitted to stay in Russia for 90 days).
Didn’t Putin already sign something about LNR and DNR passports? In February 2017, President Putin signed an executive order recognizing passports issued by the separatist authorities in Luhansk and Donetsk, requiring all Russian agencies and companies to accept these documents. Russian lawmakers say there were 157,500 and 102,474 people with passports from Donetsk and Luhansk, respectively, as of January 2018.
And everything was going so well for Aman 👎
A small hiccup in former Kemerovo Governor Aman Tuleyev's “retirement”: his plans to ascend to the speaker's role in the regional parliament have failed to win the support of Sergey Neverov, the head of United Russia's faction in the State Duma. “I think it's wrong and people simply won't understand this decision,” Neverov told the news agency Interfax on Friday. A day earlier, eight deputies from United Russia in the State Duma appealed to acting Kemerovo Governor Sergey Tsivilev, asking him to support Tuleyev's nomination for the speaker's position.
- After serving as governor for more than 20 years, Aman Tuleyev (now 73 years old) resigned on April 1, following a fire at a local shopping mall that killed 64 people, including 41 children.
Russians are dreamers, too ⚽️
According to a new national survey released by Public Opinion Foundation, four percent of Russians believe their national team will win this summer's FIFA World Cup. Fourteen percent of the country, meanwhile, don't expect Team Russia to make it to the tournament's playoffs.
Yours, Meduza