Translated material
Evening Medusa
8 August. Another sanctions against Russia: it will be bad for banks and the ruble. But not as bad as it could be!
daily News
- The Central Election Commission approved the wording of questions on the pension referendum. There are three initiative groups that want to hold this referendum, and now they will compete with each other - whoever manages to register 43 regional branches first will hold the referendum. Well, if, of course, he can collect two million signatures in his support.
- The condition of director Oleg Sentsov, who has been on hunger strike for 87 days, is “catastrophically bad.” “Oleg gave me a letter through a lawyer, he almost doesn’t get up. He wrote that the end is near, and he is not talking about liberation,” said his cousin.
- Maria Alekhina was not allowed to leave Russia. The Pussy Riot member was going to London on tour, but she only managed to get to Domodedovo. As it later turned out, Alekhina was prohibited from traveling outside the Russian Federation due to the compulsory labor with which she was punished for holding protest actions.
- The most expensive footballer in Russia, Alexander Golovin, was injured after moving to Monaco . The Russian has not yet played a single match for the new club. Recovery will take about a month.
- The US Senate has invited Julian Assange to testify about Russian interference in the elections “at a place and time convenient to everyone.” Assange, who will apparently have to leave the embassy very soon (Ecuador is in full swing negotiating this with the UK), is still thinking.
Regular sections
Section “sanctions against Russia”. This time, the United States is going to tighten sanctions against the country's largest banks, including Sberbank and VTB - the media are so actively discussing them (despite the fact that the new sanctions themselves are still far away) that bank quotes are already falling. Following them, the ruble is falling - the euro today crossed the 75 mark for the first time in several months. We made special cards where potential sanctions and their possible impact on us all were explained in clear language.
Category “case for repost”. This time the case turned out to be administrative and not criminal, but it’s still gloomy. A journalist from Tuva, Oyumu Dongak, was fined one thousand rubles for two archival pictures from World War II - one of them depicted Hitler, the other - flags with swastikas. The investigation, and then the court, decided that these pictures were Nazi propaganda.
The section “low-cost airline Pobeda finds a reason to take more money from passengers.” This time, the air carrier announced that it will make check-in at foreign airports chargeable (for the record, we note that this is a very common practice). Online registration will continue to be free.
Text of the day
Ten years ago, after an armed conflict with Georgia, Russia recognized the independence of South Ossetia and then actually took the republic under its guardianship. The politics and economy of the region are still largely controlled by Moscow. Meduza special correspondent Ilya Zhegulev went to South Ossetia to find out where billions of rubles allocated from the Russian treasury go, how South Ossetian businessmen live - and how the South Ossetian budget depends on the unrecognized republics in the East of Ukraine.
Check in for flights online - it’s more convenient in any case. Grisha Levchenko, Sasha Polivanov