The menace behind all Russia's woes: election meddling

On Tuesday, the State Duma’s Ethics Committee refused to take disciplinary action against Leonid Slutsky, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, despite allegations by multiple women journalists that he sexually harassed them. The committee’s members say the accusations were suspiciously timed to coincide with Russia’s presidential election, meaning they could be part of a coordinated campaign to undermine the country’s political system. But the Slutsky affair isn’t the only thing the Russian authorities think is part of a plot to sabotage Russia during election season.

Sexual harassment at the State Duma

“Why did you remain silent? Why did you wait until the elections to ask me this question?” That was LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s reaction to the allegations against Leonid Slutsky in late February, and it was also the State Duma’s grounds for refusing to launch an inquiry by the Ethics Committee until after Vladimir Putin’s re-election.

On March 21, when the Ethics Committee finally convened, instead of exploring the allegations against Slutsky, Duma deputies spent their time interrogating two journalists who came forward, focusing their questions on the timing of their revelations. Committee members wanted to know most of all why they waited until just weeks before “the country’s main elections.” One Duma deputy even accused the journalists of aiding the “enemy media.”

The poisoning of Sergey Skripal

On March 4, ex-spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter were hospitalized in Salisbury, England, after being exposed to a nerve agent. According to British investigators, Russian intelligence agents may have poisoned Skripal because of his past work for the UK. On March 13, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said he believes the attack on Skripal was coordinated “as a form of influence,” in part to affect Russia’s presidential election.

Team Russia’s Winter Olympics ban

In November 2017, the International Olympic Committee started disqualifying and banning Russian Olympic athletes caught up in the country’s supposed state-sponsored doping program. This investigation resulted in the IOC banning Russia from fielding a national team in the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

At the very outset of the scandal, Vladimir Putin characterized the investigation as a conspiracy to undermine Russian democracy, saying, “The Olympics in Pyeongchang are supposed to happen when? In February. And when is our presidential election? In March. There’s great suspicion that they want to create problems for Russia’s presidential election in response to our supposed interference in their [the American] elections.”

The landfill in Volokolamsk

Ahead of Russia’s presidential election, residents in the Moscow suburb of Volokolamsk started organizing mass protests against the local “Yadrovo” landfill. Presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak participated in one of these demonstrations. State-run network television thought her involvement was suspicious.

“Through and through, the main glossy symbol of today’s so-called ‘creative class’ (and I’m not afraid of this word) — it’s chief supplicant — is scrambling around at landfills in Volokolamsk, like the Energizer Bunny. And she’s giving her fiery speeches from there,” said TV presenter Kirill Kleimenov on Pervyi Kanal’s program “Vremya.” In that broadcast, nobody on the show said a word about the actual pollution crisis in Volokolamsk.

Text by Mikhail Zelensky, translation by Kevin Rothrock