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Chinese Influence on the Economy of Russia’s Far East

Over the past several decades, the economy of the Russian Far East has become increasingly oriented toward serving China.

In March 2021, Vladimir Putin approved a new large-scale project for the Russian Railways to build hundreds of kilometers of rail tracks for exporting coal from Yakutia to China. The project will cost 700 billion rubles (around $9.5 billion) and additional money is needed to provide a power supply to the Tynda-Komsomolsk section of the railway and to develop the ports of the Vanino-Sovgavansky junction. Further, in April 2021, Russian Railways started the 340 km construction of second rail tracks on the Ulak-Fevralsk section of the Baikal-Amur Mainline. The Ulak station gives access to export markets for coal from the Elginsky Coal Mine in Yakutia.

Amur Oblast is crucial for China. Besides coal mining, the Amur region holds the Power of Siberia gas pipeline and the Eastern Siberia -Pacific Ocean (ESPO) oil pipeline, both of which run to China. The Amur region also houses the Zeiskaya, Bureyskaya, and Nizhne-Bureyskaya hydroelectric power plants which provide electricity both to the Amur region and the adjacent territories in China. Finally, another strategically important infrastructure project to Beijing is the Amur Blagoveshchensk-Heihe road bridge. In the future, Russia plans to build a railway bridge in the same direction. The governor of the Amur Oblast, Vasily Orlov, is actively promoting this project as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative that will primarily serve China’s interests.

The influence exerted by China on the economy of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and Primorsky Krai is also notable. The agricultural sector of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast is almost entirely focused on producing soybeans for China. The railway bridge across the Amur Tongjiang-Nizhneleninskoye in the oblast allows for efficient export of this lucrative crop. Similarly, in the Primorsky Krai, the seaports, the agricultural sector, the logging industry, and the fishing industry are critical for the PRC.

China seeks to control the extraction and export of natural resources in the region. This can be seen prominently in the Far East’s logging industry, a sector that is under complete control of Chinese businesses. Chinese companies buy wood, primitively saw it, and control the wood quality before sending it to the PRC. The sales of round timber are the most profitable even with the intermediaries’ share, so China has no incentives to develop deep wood processing in Russia. In addition, China is not interested in purchasing processed products since it has plenty of timber processing plants in the border provinces.

The infrastructure of the Far East

The construction of a road bridge across the Amur River between Russia and China in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast is almost complete. Around six million tons of cargo are expected to pass through the bridge annually, and the flow of passengers should be approximately 3 million people per year. The length of the bridge is a little over a kilometer, and the total length of the crossing is 20 km (6 km of roads in China and 14 km of roads in Russia). The cost of the project is about 18.8 billion rubles ($256.6 million). Instead of budget funds, a concession model was used to finance the project. This provides for the construction and operation of the bridge on a commercial basis during the first 20-year billing period of the bridge’s existence. After a three-year construction period an enterprise will be permitted to collect tolls on the bridge for the first sixteen years of operation.

In Amur Oblast, Blagoveshchensk is the only regional center in Russia located on the Chinese border. The Amur River separates Blagoveshchensk and the Chinese city of Heihe. The construction of the first cross-border road bridge in the Blagoveshchensk region was completed in December 2019. Now, Russia and China are considering constructing a railway bridge in the same direction. The decision on this will be made after evaluating the economic efficiency of the road bridge. Overall, the construction of these bridge crossings will tie the transport infrastructure of the Russian Far East to China. However, China will be the one to benefit from these projects primarily.

A similarly asymmetric interaction between Russia and China can be seen in how China stands to receive economic benefits from the Power of Siberia gas pipeline and the ESPO oil pipeline for many years to come. The agreement on the oil export which established this relationship was signed in 2009. In exchange for $15 billion and $10 billion loans from the China Development Bank for Rosneft and Transneft respectively, the Russian state-owned companies pledged to supply China with 15 million tons of oil annually through the ESPO from 2011 to 2030.

Moreover, Rosneft and Transneft have provided the Chinese company CNPC with a discount of $1.5 per barrel causing Rosneft to lose about $3 billion. Therefore, it was clear from the start that China was dictating the terms under which these pipelines would operate.

As for the gas export to China, the experts say that the Power of Siberia will not pay off for its Russian creators until 2030. According to RusEnergy’s calculations, the total costs of the Power of Siberia, including the development of fields, the construction of pipelines and gas processing plants in wild taiga, the crossing near the Amur River, etc., will amount to about $100 billion. This will be almost double Gazprom’s $55 billion cost estimate. When it comes to natural gas, China is a unique consumer – it is not a “monopoly” but rather a “monopsony,” meaning that the PRC as the sole buyer in the market sets its own terms.

The Power of Siberia, which is about three thousand kilometers in length, transports gas from the Irkutsk and Yakutsk gas production centers to Russian consumers in the Far East and, crucially, to China. The parties determined the terms of the partnership in an intergovernmental agreement in October 2014, and the gas supplies started flowing in December 2019. Russia is the second biggest gas supplier to China after Turkmenistan. Gas exports to China via this pipeline in 2020 amounted to 4.1 billion cubic meters. In 2021, the supplies are expected to double. The planned level of supplies for the Power of Siberia is 38 billion cubic meters per year. Still, China and Russia are discussing the possibility of increasing the maximum supply volume by another 6 billion cubic meters.

In the first quarter of 2020, the price for a thousand cubic meters was $202. In January 2021, the price fell significantly and is now below $120. Of all pipeline gas suppliers, Russia exports gas to China at the lowest price. In comparison, in January 2021, Turkmenistan received $187 per thousand cubic meters for its gas, Kazakhstan for $162, Uzbekistan for $151, and Myanmar for $352.

Additionally, the Amur Gas Processing Plant (GPP) is one of Gazprom’s most significant infrastructure projects in the Russian Far East. This plant will process multicomponent natural gas from the Yakutsk and Irkutsk gas production centers supplied through the Power of Siberia gas pipeline. Valuable components extracted during processing will become raw materials for enterprises in the gas, chemical, and other industries. The capacity of the plant will be 42 billion cubic meters of gas per year. The GPP will also include the world’s largest helium production venue, producing up to 60 million cubic meters per year. In addition to natural gas and helium, the plant’s commercial products will include ethane, propane, butane, and pentane-hexane fraction. The plant will consist of six processing lines, and the launch of the first two is scheduled for 2021. Gazprom will be gradually introducing the rest of the lines in the next four years. Thus, the plant will start working at its total capacity by the end of 2025.

In 2020, Russian company SIBUR and Chinese company Sinopec signed an agreement on creating a joint venture on the Amur Gas and Chemical Complex (AGCC). It is one of the world’s largest plants producing base polymers with a total capacity of 2.7 million tons per year. Russian’s share in the deal will be 60%, and Chinese will be 40%. The construction of the complex will be synchronized with Gazprom’s Amur GPP, so that both reach full capacity by 2025. The supply of ethane and liquefied hydrocarbon gas from Amur GPP will provide the AGCC with raw materials for further processing into high-value-added products. Due to the geographic location of the complex, the AGCC’s products will be focused primarily on the PRC market, the largest consumer of polymers in the world. The budget of the Amur Gas Chemical Complex is estimated at $10-11 billion.

Timeline: Export of electricity to China

1992 A 110 kV transmission line “Blagoveshchensk-Heihe,” connecting the power systems of Russia and China, was built. Electricity exports to China began at 30-160 million kWh per year.

2005  A long-term cooperation agreement was signed between the Unified Energy Systems (UES) of Russia and the State Grid Corporation of China.

2007  Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao signed a joint declaration “Supporting Major Energy Projects.” This document outlined Russian-Chinese energy cooperation’s fundamental principles and approaches.

2009 Russian Eastern Energy Company (EEC) and the State Grid Corporation of China signed a contract to supply China with electricity via the existing 220 kV Blagoveshchenskaya-Aigun and 110 kV Blagoveshchensk-Heihe transmission lines. The total volume of annual electricity supplies that year amounted to 854 million kWh.

2011 Russian company EEC built a 500-kV power transmission line, “Amurskaya-Heihe,” which connected the Amur Region of Russia and the north-eastern regions of the PRC with an interstate ultrahigh voltage power transmission line. The project made it possible to significantly increase the export of electricity to China, which amounted to 1.24 billion kWh that year.

2012 A 25-year contract was signed to supply China with electricity in a total volume of 100 billion kWh. In June, the State Electric Grid Corporation of China and Inter RAO signed a memorandum on expanding electric power cooperation. Electricity exports to China in 2012 amounted to 2.63 billion kWh.

2013 An agreement to expand Russian-Chinese electricity cooperation was signed. The document envisages the complex projects for the development of coal resources in the Russian regions of the Far East, the construction of large thermal power plants, and ultra-high voltage power lines to increase the volume of electricity supplies to China. Electricity exports in 2013 amounted to 3.495 billion kWh.

Ou Xiaoming, the representative of the Russian branch of the State Grid Corporation of China, said at the Russian Energy Week international forum that in the future, the volume of electricity imports from Russia to China would not change.

Chinese investments in the economy of the Russian Far East

The Russian Central Bank (CB) publishes official statistics on foreign investments in Russia. According to the CB, the presence of Chinese capital in the economy of the Far East is surprisingly negligible. As of July 2019, China’s share in the total accumulated foreign investment in the region was only 0.8% ($530 million). For reference, Cyprus’s investments in the Far East amounted to $4.1 billion.

The specifics of the CB’s calculations explain this seeming absence of Chinese investment. The CB does not take small business investments and informal business activity into account. In addition, the Central Bank’s data does not trace the investors in offshore schemes, which account for up to 95% of foreign investments in the Far East region. As a result, many Chinese enterprises appear in the official data as Russian or, for example, Bahamian.

However, the data of the Ministry for the Development of the Russian Far East tell a very different story. According to the Ministry, at the end of 2019, China’s share in the total volume of foreign direct investment in the region was 63% (45 projects worth $2.6 billion). In 2017, the investments were $4 billion.

 This large difference can perhaps be explained by the fact that the Ministry simply summed up the announced project estimates without investigating how much money actually got into the region. In other words, it is impossible to know precisely how significant the Chinese investment in the Far East of Russia actually is. Yet, it can be claimed with some certainty that the real numbers are higher than the official ones but less than those publicly announced by Chinese and Russian officials.

Agriculture, forestry, and construction are the three pillars of Chinese capital in the Far East. Small and medium-sized Chinese companies in the Far East have extensive experience doing business and supporting informal relations with their Russian counterpart s. Many Russian and Chinese entrepreneurs are family friends who send their children to study with each other. As a result, a solid foundation for cross-border investment has been formed.

Chinese migration

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, for the first half of 2019, one in every ten foreigners coming to Russia were Chinese citizens. During this time, 863, 000 Chinese citizens were registered for migration, which was 30% more than in the first half of 2018.

The informational and analytical agency “East of Russia” analyzed the Ministry of Internal Affairs data and discovered that there are more Chinese people among the foreign employees who got work quotas than those from other nations. Indeed, the Ministry of Labor issued more than half of all quotas for this region to Chinese citizens, but the actual numbers are relatively modest – 27.8 thousand people. Overall, at the end of the first half of 2019, 39.8 thousand Chinese had a valid work permit in Russia. These documents are usually valid for a few months.

Russians’ attitudes towards the Chinese migration is generally negative. According to the Levada Center poll published in September 2019, more than half of Russians (53%) favored limiting Chinese migration. 28% of those surveyed were ready to let Chinese people in the Russian Federation only temporarily, and 25% were in favor of a complete ban on the arrival of Chinese citizens in the country. Only 19% of the respondents were ready to see immigrants from China among the residents of Russia.

The main risk of the Chinese migration in the Far East is that the number of Chinese people permanently living in the region can increase due to their shared border of the Amur River. This could happen quickly with the construction of two bridges across the Amur in the Amur Oblast and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Most importantly, the Chinese (both who live in the Russian Far East and those who live in the border provinces of China) consider the Russian Far East to be historically Chinese land.

Yuri Moskalenko

“We will make sure your family suffers if you don’t confess”: The case of Artyom Zagrebelny

Case Overview

On 7 November 2019, 27-year-old Artyom Zagrebelny was detained by three Federal Security Service (FSB) officers in the entrance hall of this apartment building. The officers attempted to detain Zagrebelny using physical force to search his apartment, but he resisted and sprayed pepper spray in the officers’ direction. The spray got into the eyes of two of them, and after a brief struggle, the officers finally detained Zagrebelny.

According to the investigation, Artyom Zagrebelny knowingly used violence against the two FSB officers on duty and deliberately pepper-sprayed them, ‘being dissatisfied that he was being detained and wishing to flee.’ The two officers testified in court that they told Zagrebelny they were from the FSB, and one of them showed his official ID. Based on the conclusions of forensic expertise, the court charged Zagrebelny based on Article 318, Part 2 of the Criminal Code of Russia (“Use of violence dangerous to life or health of a government official”).

The Description of the Events

However, according to Zagrebelny, he did not know they were FSB officers because they wore civilian clothes, did not introduce themselves, and did not show any ID. The officers simply forced Zagrebelny out of the elevator of his apartment building, after which he used pepper spray against them as self-defense. As soon as one of the officers shouted he was from the FSB, Zagrebelny immediately stopped resisting and using the pepper spray.

According to the human rights center Otkrytki, Zagrebelny shared that after he was detained, the officers put him in a car and beat him up: “They started asking questions like ‘you, pravosek [member of the Right Sector, a far-right Ukrainian nationalist party], came from Khokhlyandiya [a derogatory name for Ukraine], right?’ Then someone burst into the car and started kicking me in the back with their legs. Then they grabbed me by the neck and lifted me.”

After that, the officers interrogated Zagrebelny and demanded that he confess to trying to kill a government employee (Article 317, Part 2 of the Criminal Code), all while beating Zagrebelny up and threatening to rape his wife, Margarita. On November 10, 2019, Zagrebelny went to the doctor and was found to have multiple bruises all over his body and a broken rib.

Also, according to Zagrebelny, one of the FSB officers Aleksandr Akhmetov, came up to his wife and started forcing her to commit an administrative crime. “He told her to find the Third Reich’s symbolism on the Internet, post it in some group on social media and send it to the officer on WhatsApp so he could charge her for an administrative offense, fine her for 1,000 rubles, and let her free. She asked him why she would do that, and he said it was revenge for the pepper spray. Another officer told her earlier they would keep taking revenge on her in many different ways, including the “not-so-legal” ones. Later in the day, Akhmatov messaged her on WhatsApp, saying, ‘Margarita, are you forgetting something?’ I told her not to post anything.”

Current State of the Case

Zagrebelny is currently in prison. The Prosecutor’s Office was initially asking to give Zagrebelny nine years in prison. The court of the original jurisdiction gave him five years, and after the appeal on April 22, 2021, the sentence was reduced to three years and ten months.

Why has the Memorial Human Rights Center recognized Zagrebelny as a political prisoner?

Based on the case materials, Memorial has concluded that Artyom Zagrebelny did not exceed the limits of reasonable self-defense while using pepper spray on his attackers. It was not apparent to him that the men belonged to law enforcement agencies or that their actions were lawful.

CCTV footage from the entrance hall and the elevator in Zagrebelny’s apartment building confirm his version of the events. The footage clearly shows that none of the officers showed any ID or introduced themselves. It is also doubtful that the officers suffered any injuries. The examinations carried out the day after the incident found no evidence of any injury. However, they were established during subsequent tests carried out three weeks later. The context of Zagrebelny’s case is also essential. The day Zagrebelny was detained, the FSB officers went to his home on the minor matter of checking his correspondence on the VKontakte social media site for extremism. No criminal case was opened regarding the correspondence. As described above, once in detention, Zagrebelny and his wife were subjected to extreme intimidation (forcing to confess to a nonexistent crime arrest under threat of his wife getting raped). The Memorial Human Rights Center believes that this case is strictly politically motivated, and Artyom Zagrebelny is being held in prison illegally. The Memorial demands his immediate release.

Lukashenka’s Ryanair Hijacking Proves Human Rights is a Global Security Issue

The forced diversion and landing in Minsk of a May 23, 2021 Ryanair flight en route from Greece to Lithuania, and the subsequent arrest of dissident Roman Protasevich who was aboard the flight, by the illegitimate Lukashenka regime pose an overt political and military challenge to Europe, NATO and the broad global community.  NATO members must respond forcefully by demanding (1) the immediate release of Protasevich and other political prisoners in Belarus, and (2) a prompt transition to a government that represents the will of the people of Belarus. 

The West’s passivity in the face of massive, continuous and growing oppression of the Belarusian people since summer 2020 has emboldened Lukashenka to commit what some European leaders have appropriately termed an act of “state terrorism.”

The West has shown a manifest disposition to appease Putin’s regime —Lukashenka’s sole security guarantor. It has made inappropriate overtures for a Putin-Biden summit and waived  Nord Stream 2 sanctions mandated by Congress. These actions and signals have come against the backdrop of the 2020 Russian constitutional coup, the assassination attempt against Navalny and his subsequent imprisonment on patently bogus charges, the arrests of close to 13,000 Russian activists, and the outlawing of all opposition movements and activities. All this has led Putin and Lukashenka to conclude that they eliminate their political opponents with impunity.  

Today’s state-ordered hijacking of an international passenger airplane—employing intelligence agents aboard the flight,  and accomplished via an advanced fighter-interceptor—to apprehend an exiled activist, underscores that violation of human rights is not only a domestic issue, but a matter of international safety and security.  Western governments unwilling to stand up for the victims of Putin’s and Lukashenka’s regimes are inviting future crimes against their own citizens. 

Absent a meaningful and swift response, the escalation of violence and intensity of international crimes committed  by Lukashenka’s and Putin’s regime will continue, destabilizing the world and discrediting the Western democratic institutions. 

The Kremlin’s Political Prisoners: the “Sanitary” Case Background

In March 2020, under the pretense of battling the coronavirus epidemic, federal and regional authorities of Russia adopted repressive legal norms and vague, potentially dangerous criminal articles that attack constitutional rights and freedoms. Unsurprisingly, in January 2021, the adoption of these repressive norms led to a political case. 

Case overview 

On January 23, 2021, mass protests supporting Alexey Navalny, fueled by horrendous police brutality, were held in 198 Russian cities and 95 cities abroad. The next day, the Investigative Committee of Russia opened a criminal case against ten opposition activists and politicians for calling people to a peaceful protest on January 23. The criminal charge is based on Article 236 of Part 1 of the Criminal Code of Russia (envisaging a prison sentence of up to 2 years), indicating“the incitement to violate sanitary and epidemiological rules which, by negligence, entailed a mass illness or poisoning of people, or created a threat of the onset of such consequences.” 

According to the Memorial Human Rights Center, this criminal case is politically motivated and is related to the defendants’ political beliefs violating their right to freedom of expression and the right to protest. The persecution is carried out in violation of the right to a fair trial and aims to forcibly end opposition activities and intimidate Alexey Navalny’s supporters.

Illegally prosecuted case defendants 

While awaiting trial, the case defendants are either banned from performing specific actions or are held under house arrest. House arrest implies the inability to leave the house, communicate with certain people (often, the communication is limited to the relatives living in the same house), send and receive letters, and use the phone and the Internet. 

Maria Alyokhina – activist and member of a feminist music band “Pussy Riot”. She was previously recognized by the Memorial Human Rights Center as a political prisoner and already spent two years in prison. Alyokhina is once again a victim of the repressive system and has been under strict house arrest since January 29, 2021, as part of the “Sanitary” case. 

Nikolai Lyaskin – an oppositionist who was also recognized as a political prisoner by the Memorial Human Rights Center before. Just like Maria Alyokhina, he is once again a victim of the repressive system and has been under house arrest since January 29, 2021, as part of the “Sanitary” case. On April 26, the court allowed him to leave the house for 12 hours instead of the 2 hours permitted initially. 

Oleg Navalny – Alexey Navalny’s brother, another previously recognized political prisoner who already served a sentence of almost 4 years. On April 7, 2021, as part of the “Sanitary” case, he was released from house arrest but is still banned from leaving the house at night, communicating with other case defendants, and using mail and the Internet. 

Lyubov Sobol – opposition politician and the Anti-corruption Foundation’s lawyer who was put under house arrest on January 29, 2021. She was not allowed to go to church on Sundays or take her daughter to school. 40 NGOs appealed to the United Nations to release Lyubov Sobol, stating in a joint appeal that “Sobol has been condemned to total isolation under house arrest awaiting trial on two fake criminal charges. Her only crime was peacefully calling for a more fair, free, and democratic Russia. The arbitrary arrest and detention of Sobol are a blatant violation of human rights. She must be released immediately.” On April 7, 2021, she was released from house arrest but just like Oleg Navalny Sobol is still not allowed to leave the house after 8 PM, communicate with other defendants, write letters and use the Internet. 

Konstantinas Yankauskas – municipal deputy of the Zyuzino district in Moscow. He has now been recognized by the Memorial Human Rights Center as a political prisoner twice. He has been under house arrest for two months and was released on April 7, 2021, with a ban on performing specific actions along with Lyubov Sobol. 

Dmitriy Baranovskiy – municipal deputy of the Northern Izmailovo district in Moscow, was arrested on February 1, 2021, and has been under house arrest ever since.

Anastasiya Vasilyeva – an ophthalmologist, leader of the independent labor union “Alliance of Doctors,” has spent a month under house arrest and was released on April 7, 2021, but is still banned from leaving the house at night. 

Lyudmila (Lyusya) Shtein – municipal deputy of the Basmanny district in Moscow. She has been under house arrest for two months and was released on April 7, 2021, but along with other case defendants, she is also not allowed to perform specific actions. 

Oleg Stepanov – the former coordinator of Alexey Navalny’s Headquarters in Moscow, was arrested on January 29, 2021, and has been under house arrest ever since. 

Kira Yarmysh – Alexey Navalny’s press secretary, has been under strict house arrest since January 29, 2021. As mentioned above, on April 7, 2021, the court released a few case defendants from house arrest but refused to release Kira Yarmysh. 

Six reasons why the Memorial Human Rights Center considers 10 case defendants political prisoners 

1. The restrictive measures taken to combat the spread of the coronavirus are not sufficient grounds to unconditionally ban public events and grossly violate the right to freedom of assembly, enshrined in Art. 31 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. 

2. Almost all restrictions on cultural and entertainment events in Moscow were lifted before the protests. 

3. The case defendants did not know and could not know if people who were on self-isolation would respond to their calls to protest on social media. 

4. The defendants’ actions do not constitute corpus delicti as they should not be held responsible for the irresponsible behavior of others. 

5. There is no conclusive evidence that public events, carried out with the necessary precautions in the open air, can seriously increase the spread of coronavirus infection compared to attending cultural and recreational events or using public transport. 

6. Prosecuting thousands of peaceful protesters based on the violation of sanitary and epidemiological restrictions is especially cynical given that the protesters were being transported in cramped police vans, held in police departments and special detention centers in conditions that are much more conducive to the further spread of the disease.

Criminal operations by Russia’s GRU worldwide: expert discussion

Please join Free Russia Foundation for an expert brief and discussion on latest criminal operations conducted by Russia’s GRU worldwide with:

  • Christo Grozev, Bellingcat— the legendary investigator who uncovered the Kremlin’s involvement, perpetrators and timeline of Navalny’s assassination attempt. 
  • Jakub Janda, Director of the European Values Think Tank (the Czech Republic) where he researches Russia’s hostile influence operations in the West
  • Michael Weiss, Director of Special Investigations at Free Russia Foundation where he leads the Lubyanka Files project, which consists of translating and curating KGB training manuals still used in modern Russia for the purposes of educating Vladimir Putin’s spies.

The event will take place on Tuesday, May 11 from 11 am to 12:30pm New York Time (17:00 in Brussels) and include an extensive Q&A with the audience moderated by Ilya Zaslavskiy, Senior Fellow at Free Russia Foundation and head of Underminers.info, a research project on post-Soviet kleptocracy

The event will be broadcast live at: https://www.facebook.com/events/223365735790798/

  • The discussion will cover Russia’s most recent and ongoing covert violent operations, direct political interference, oligarchic penetration with money and influence; 
  • GRU’s structure and approach to conducting operations in Europe
  • Trends and forecasts on how data availability will impact both, the Kremlin’s operations and their investigation by governments and activists; 
  • EU and national European government response and facilitation of operations on their soil; 
  • Recommendations for effective counter to the security and political threats posed by Russian security services. 

YouTube Against Navalny’s Smart Voting

On May 6, 2020, at least five YouTube channels belonging to key Russian opposition leaders and platforms received notifications from YouTube that some of their content had been removed due to its being qualified as “spam, deceptive practices and scams”. 

They included: 

Ilya Yashin (343k YouTube subscribers)

Vladimir Milov (218k YouTube subscribers) 

Leonid Volkov (117k YouTube subscribers)

Novaya Gazeta (277k YouTube Subscribers) 

Sota Vision (248k YouTube Subscribers)

Most likely, there are other Russian pro-democracy channels that have received similar notifications at the same time, and we are putting together the list of all affected by this censorship campaign. 

The identical letters received from YouTube by the five account holders stated:

“Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our spam, deceptive practices and scams policy. We’ve removed the following content from YouTube:

URL: https://votesmart.appspot.com/“

YouTube has removed urls from descriptions of videos posted on these accounts that linked to Alexey Navalny’s Smart Voting website (votesmart.appspot.com).

By doing this, and to our great shock and disbelief, YouTube has acted to enforce the Kremlin’s policies by qualifying Alexey Navalny’s Smart Voting system and its website as “spam, deceptive practices and scams”. 

This action has not only technically disrupted communication for the Russian civil society which is now under a deadly siege by Putin’s regime, but it has rendered a serious and lasting damage to its reputation and legitimacy of Smart Voting approach. 

In reality, Smart Voting system is not a spam, scam or a “deceptive practice”, but instead it’s a fully legitimate system of choosing and supporting candidates in Russian elections who have a chance of winning against the ruling “United Russia” party candidates. There’s absolutely nothing illegal, deceptive or fraudulent about the Smart Voting or any materials on its website.

We don’t know the reasons behind such YouTube actions, but they are an unacceptable suppression of a constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the Russian people and help the Kremlin’s suppression of civil rights and freedoms by banning the Smart Voting system and not allowing free political competition with the ruling “United Russia” party. 

This is an extremely dangerous precedent in an environment where opposition activities in Russia are being literally outlawed;  key opposition figures are jailed, exiled, arrested and attacked with criminal investigations; independent election campaigning is prohibited; and social media networks remain among the very few channels still available to the Russian opposition to communicate with the ordinary Russians.

We demand a  swift and decisive action on this matter from the international community, to make sure that YouTube corrects its stance toward Russian opposition channels, and ensures that such suppression of peaceful, legal  pro-democracy voices does not happen again. 

You Don’t Have to Be Recruited to Work for Russian Intelligence

A classified KGB training manual on “confidential contacts” explores the gray area between informant and agent.

This essay originally appeared in Newlines Magazine. The KGB training manual it refers to was translated into English by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick.

It may be the world’s second oldest profession but unlike prostitution it’s still woefully misunderstood. Is it because espionage is equal parts science and artistry — and therefore too marbled a discipline — that it usually requires years of study and practice to even begin to comprehend? Or is it because literature and popular culture have given us the enticing but mythologized image of the windswept figure in the homburg and trench coat crossing a bridge to meet his legended contact, or chalking the coded signal on a designated lamppost to indicate the dead drop has been made. Perhaps this kind of thing does happen, but 99% of intelligence work is still tedium and repetition, “like taking out the trash,” as one former spook once put it. And, contrary to the self-aggrandizing memoirists and their adaptive screenwriters, there are always rules, especially those governing the blurred lines of human interaction. Those rules were never more codified than by Soviet theoreticians of spycraft, whose job it was to train the agents of History.

Consider the following (fictional) case study.

Lucy McGrath is a political correspondent with a midlevel online news website. As part of her job, Lucy meets with all sorts: administration insiders who talk to her on deep background, representatives and senators from both parties, their legislative staffers, as well as a host of foreign diplomats whose job it is to relay the latest Beltway scuttlebutt and press clippings back to their capitals. Over the past six months, Lucy has developed a two-martini relationship with one such foreign diplomat, Viktor Sudoplatov.

Viktor’s business card describes him as the Head of the Economic Section at the Russian Embassy. He is witty, charming, and a lot of fun to talk to, a set of characteristics he’s spent years honing as an officer of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. In the past, Viktor has given Lucy what she believes were incredibly shrewd insights into the details of everything from the START treaty to Russia’s military interventions in Syria and Libya. On one lazy Thursday afternoon, over an uncharacteristic third martini at the Tabard Inn, Lucy felt comfortable enough to dispense information rather than receive it. She shared with Viktor the draft of the story she was about to file on the sexual improprieties of a high-level cabinet official. The story is airtight, backed up by a host of on-the-record comments, and will inevitably lead to the official’s resignation. And while her editor certainly wouldn’t take too kindly to Lucy’s ethical slip, she’s hardly doing anything illegal. Moreover, the sex pest in the White House is especially hawkish on Russia and Lucy is genuinely worried that America and its former Cold War adversary are sleepwalking into “World War III” (an impression subtly encouraged by Viktor over the last six months). In her mind, divulging her newspaper’s as-yet-unpublished scoop is actually in the interest of advancing world peace and fostering bilateral comity. Or maybe that’s the vermouth talking. Viktor reassures Lucy she’s a tribute to her profession and country upon scanning the jaw-dropping revelations on her iPhone.

Lucy is what’s known in parlance of Russian intelligence as a “confidential contact.” She’s not quite an agent, but she’s no longer a mere civilian. What she doesn’t realize is that she’s been vetted and cultivated for this special category of accomplice for far longer than she’s known Viktor, who, in both his official and unofficial capacities, gets to know American journalists because they’re walking storehouses of useful information and they know other people who might prove even more valuable to him. Lucy didn’t receive any special training as an asset of a foreign government, nor will she, provided she remains a reporter. She might have even convinced herself that her interlocutor is “only” a representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, a delusion Viktor will continue to abet by his failure to ever come clean about who and what he really is.

In 1977, the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, published 220 copies of a training manual devoted to confidential contacts — how to target them, how to run them, and how they differ from full-blown agents of Moscow. Written by Colonel V.M. Maksimov, the manual was released in the original Russian along with an English translation for the first time by the Free Russia Foundation as part of their ongoing Lubyanka Files project.

English translation of the Confidential Contacts manual. Download PDF

The original Confidential Contacts (Доверительные связи) manual in Russian. Download PDF

Confidential contacts can be virtually anyone: politicians, diplomats, scientists, businessmen, engineers, and reporters like Lucy. They have no classified intelligence or state secrets to pass on, and sometimes the safest way of engaging them is in plain sight, under the guise of their everyday work: What’s so unusual or eyebrow-raising about a journalist meeting with an embassy official in a public place?

Occasionally, the confidential contact may be solicited to perform “active measures,” or try to influence or inveigle their own governments or societies into doing Moscow’s bidding. It is here that the line between unwitting informant and agent becomes blurred. Thus, we learn from Maksimov that there was once a member of parliament in a liberal democracy who “spoke out for developing friendly relations with the Soviet Union and resolutely rejected the foreign policy line of the new government of his country.” “Deputy,” as the MP was code-named in the manual, was asked by the KGB rezidentura to instigate the resignation of his government, which had taken on an anti-Soviet foreign policy. Deputy raised “an inquiry in parliament using points prompted by us, and (raised) the issue of no confidence. Deputy went through the necessary preparation for the intended event, bringing over to his side several undecided members of parliament, and correctly determining the most advantageous moment to raise the inquiry. As a result, the government received a vote of no confidence and was forced to step down. Normal relations were reestablished with Deputy’s country of citizenship.”

Under these circumstances, Deputy has become something more than a relay of useful information; he’s become an agent of influence, albeit one almost certainly not informed by his handlers that they’re actually KGB officers. This is the crucial, abiding difference between a confidential contact and agent: The latter is always eventually made aware of his true role. Deputy is acting (or so he thinks) out of conviction and self-interest, even if both have been massaged by a friendly “representative” of a foreign government to which he’s already sympathetic.

By dint of their access to privileged information, confidential contacts can be elevated to agents, particularly if they advance in their careers to the extent that the information they are privy to is guarded by national security laws.

Consider two paths Lucy might take. Path one: Burnt out and fed up with journalism, she decides to parlay her vast contacts in the U.S. government into a U.S. government job, one requiring security clearance. Viktor might decide to target her for full recruitment. She’d be given training in the rules of tradecraft — the art of clandestinity — and she’d likely even be assigned a new handler, someone she hasn’t spent months being spotted by friends and colleagues in the company of since her new role is bound to draw the unwanted scrutiny of domestic counterintelligence.

Path two: Lucy might stay in her reporting job but in the course of better getting to know Viktor, introduce him to Josh Heller, a low-level enforcement officer at the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the U.S. Treasury Department. Owing to the unending headache of American sanctions on Russian officials and institutions, having such a person in one’s pocket has been deemed a high priority by Moscow Center and so Viktor might determine that Josh is ripe for recruitment and has all the personality traits that make him susceptible to it. In that scenario, Lucy as confidential contact has now graduated into becoming an unwitting (or half-witting) talent spotter or recruiter-agent for the SVR, even if she’s still technically designated by that service a confidential contact. Here’s the manual:

“(O)ne of the foreign KGB rezidenturas was cultivating ‘Vir’ and ‘Gek,’ two officers of a political party’s headquarters staff, to establish confidential contacts with them. Vir, however, soon went to work for a government agency whose employees do not have the right to meet with foreign representatives. Under these conditions, materials on Vir were reviewed and the decision was made to deepen the relations with him for the purpose of his recruitment, since meetings with Vir at a confidential level had become impossible. Meanwhile, contact by the party figure Gek with a Soviet representative could not be viewed as a violation of the law, and information coming from him did not go beyond internal party problems. Therefore, work with him at the level of confidential relations quite ensured both the security of the collaboration and addressing information tasks.”

For Gek, politics wasn’t even a factor, meaning he needn’t have even a flickering interest in socialism to become or stay a confidential contact, whereas Vir, as part of his development and recruitment as an agent, will have been worked over with Marxist-Leninist indoctrination. Because confidential contacts were more a grab-bag assortment of Soviet intelligence assets during the Cold War, it follows that there were very many more of them than there were proper agents, who required far more investment and resources to manufacture and maintain. Some confidential contacts, in fact, were committed anti-Communists whose motives aligned tactically or strategically with those of the Soviet Union:

“For example, a KGB rezidentura enlisted ‘Lan,’ a major political figure who advocated anti-communist positions in confidential collaboration on an ideological and political basis. His enlistment in collaboration was facilitated by the circumstance that in relations between his country and a neighboring country, the Soviet Union supported Lan’s country, whereas the Americans defended the interests of the other country. An intelligence officer persuaded Lan that by passing on information to us about the position of the government of his country, about the content of negotiations with the Americans, about their plans and intentions, he would be acting in keeping with his own political views.

“Lan began confidential collaboration with the intelligence officer and continued it after the settlement of the conflict on the basis of his remaining lack of trust in U.S. policy regarding his homeland, and understanding that the Soviet Union not only did not threaten its independence, but in accordance with its foreign policy principles, advocated support of this independence. Even so, Lan did not change his bourgeois views and openly told the intelligence agent of his disagreement with the ideas of socialism. Under these conditions, the intelligence officer did not try to change Lan’s worldview, avoided arguments about ideological issues, but continued to reinforce his anti-American positions, which had served as the basis for confidential collaboration.”

Like all the KGB training manuals in the Lubyanka Files series, Colonel Maksimov’s 44-year-old text is still in curricular use at the FSB (Russia’s successor to the KGB) and SVR Academies in Moscow, meaning the theory it articulates continues to guide Russian intelligence officers well into the 21st century. One of the merits of reading how Moscow defines confidential contacts and distinguishes them from controlled agents is that it demystifies the foggy landscape in which recent debates about Russian human intelligence has taken place.

Over the last five years, Americans have been bombarded with news stories, opinion pieces, and broadcast pundit lectures about this important subject: how professional operatives or billionaire oligarchs connived to sway the country’s political and social trajectories, not least by seconding a colorful assortment of chancers, grifters, and useful idiots associated with the Trump campaign and then the Trump presidency to do their dirty work. Stories have varied between the rigorously investigated and well-documented and the crudely sensationalized and inevitably underwhelming. The latter genre has no doubt contributed to the almost palpable sense of national anticlimax that attended the publication and Talmudic exegesis of the Mueller Report, itself no serious exercise in counterintelligence but an attempt to uncover criminal conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Le Carré and Ludlum fans will have searched in vain through that doorstop document for the microfiche, dead drop, and bug. But they’ll have also missed the point.

One doesn’t have to be Alger Hiss or Robert Hanssen to have a dangerous liaison with a man or woman from Moscow Center. And there is an entire category of Westerner upon whom that Center has relied for decades to provide credible and valuable information, the provision of which depends only on moral resolve and discretion. The confidential contact takes relatively few risks, can never be brought to book for his actions (only for lying about them after the fact to the authorities), and may not even know or allow themself to believe they’ve been seduced into dancing with the devil.

Free Russia Foundation condemns in strongest terms today’s court sentence announced to Alexey Navalny

Continued detention of Navalny is illegal and he must be freed immediately. Suppression of peaceful protests and mass arrests of Russian citizens must stop, and the Kremlin must release all those illegally detained and imprisoned on political motives. Free Russia Foundation calls on the international community, the US and European leadership, to move beyond expressions of concern and articulate a set of meaningful instruments to compel the Kremlin to stop its atrocities.

Free Russia Foundation demands Navalny’s immediate release

On January 17, 2021, Putin’s agents arrested Alexey Navalny as he returned to Russia from Germany where he was treated for a near-deadly poisoning perpetrated by state-directed assassins.

Navalny’s illegal arrest constitutes kidnapping. He is kept incommunicado from his lawyer and family at an unknown location and his life is in danger.

Free Russia Foundation demands his immediate release and an international investigation of crimes committed against him by Putin’s government.

Global Financial Flows of Putin’s Russia

This report describes mechanisms and schemes used by Putin’s regime to finance its illegal activities around the world. 

The report is based on the unique materials collected between 2018-2020 by the Free Russia Foundation team through hundreds of insider and expert interviews conducted throughout the post-Soviet space, Europe, North America, Central Asia and the Middle East.   

Based on the insights gained through this investigative and analytical effort, the report articulates likely scenarios for the development of Putin’s System and offers recommendations for countering its malign influence. 

Адреса, явки, фамилии. Публикуем документы о том, как принимаются решения о «нежелательных» организациях

22 июля Московский городской суд рассмотрит апелляционную жалобу фонда «Свободная Россия»* на решение Тверского суда, отказавшегося отменить постановление Генпрокуратуры о признании организации «нежелательной» на территории России.

Continue reading Адреса, явки, фамилии. Публикуем документы о том, как принимаются решения о «нежелательных» организациях →

does the drop in oil prices threaten Putin’s regime?

The ongoing decline in global oil prices is very bad news for Putin’s regime which depends on oil and gas revenues for about 40% of its federal budget.

This “black swan” comes in a flock— it coincides with the global coronavirus pandemic, the introduction of new US sanctions targeting the Russian energy sector; and on the domestic front, exacerbated by an extremely unpopular move by Putin to rewrite the Constitution with the sole goal of remaining in power for life.

We put together a matrix with scenarios for Russia under various energy market assumptions. Below, we have put together a matrix with scenarios for Russia and various energy market assumptions.

This is an excerpt from a Free Russia Foundation study Russian Scenarios 2030, that also includes chapters on:

· Elites’ Cohesion and Coup D’état
· Military Confrontation
· Russia as a Proxy Superpower of China
· Decentralization
· Local Military Conflicts
· Two Positive Scenarios
· The Sanctions Scenario
· State Crony Capitalism
· Russia and China in 2030
· De-escalation
· Succession after Putin’s Unexpected Death

Download PDF

Conference Review: Strategies to Defend Democratic Institutions and the Rule of Law in the Westand Is Propaganda Protected Speech

Jeremy W. Lamoreaux

Three Requirements for Democracy

The history of humankind has been dominated by authoritarian-type governments, with democracies considerably less common for a number of reasons, three of which I would like to emphasize here. Firstly, democracy only functions properly when the populace is informed and engaged on political issues. In the case of a direct democracy, the executive is directly responsible to, and derives his authority directly from the people. This type of democracy requires the people to be well-informed about laws affecting them, and to participate in the political process to pass and amend those laws.

Continue reading Conference Review: Strategies to Defend Democratic Institutions and the Rule of Law in the Westand Is Propaganda Protected Speech →

The curious case of Suleyman Kerimov in France

The case of the Kremlin-connected oligarch Suleyman Kerimov is a testimony to the power of the Russian state when it is used to the benefit of its allies in western courts. In 2017-18 Kerimov faced serious allegations of money laundering and other wrongdoing in the French courts. After the introduction of political pressure from Moscow, however, the French legal system started to produce strange results that eventually led to the dismissal of all charges levied against the oligarch. Recently, however, a French judge placed Kerimov back under formal investigation on suspicion of compliance in aggravated tax fraud. The outcome of this new case will indicate the ability of the French legal system to act independently despite pressure from the Russian government.

Suleyman Kerimov, nicknamed the “Russian Gatsby”, is the 21st richest person in Russia with an estimated net worth of 5.4 billion euros, the majority owner in Russia’s biggest gold mining company, Polyus PJSC, and a senator in the Russian Federation Council for the region of Dagestan. Upon landing in Nice for a vacation trip in November 2017, he was arrested by the French police and questioned for two days over alleged tax evasion and money laundering in connection with the purchase of real estate on the French Riviera.

The court in Nice charged him with tax fraud, set bail at 5 million euros, and forced Kerimov to give his passport away and to not leave France. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation sent a note to the French authorities, stating that Kerimov should have immunity from prosecution, by virtue of his diplomatic passport (link). According to the French, however, Kerimov did not use it when he flew to Nice. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs claims that Kerimov’s immunity does not apply to actions not connected to his functions (link).

Two weeks later, prosecutors asked for Kerimov to be placed in custody or for his bail to be increased to 50 million euros. The court in Aix-en-Provence then set the bail to 40 million euros, put restrictions on those, with whom he may communicate, but still allowed him to stay out of custody (link).

In 2018, under provisions of a law passed by congress in 2017, the US treasury department announced sanctions against Russian oligarchs (including Kerimov), companies, and senior government members in retaliation against Moscow’s meddling in 2016 US presidential elections (link). Two months later, Kerimov won in a ruling at a court in the Aix-en-Provence that removed the charges set against him and allowed him the right to leave France. According to Kerimov’s defense team, they persuaded the court that the allegations did not qualify as money laundering, only as tax fraud (link). The prosecutor stated, however, that he is surprised by the ruling and indicated that he will consider an appeal to the highest French court (link).

Due mostly to a lack of understanding about why Kerimov was cleared of charges and based on the statements by the prosecutor’ office, it would appear that the judicial process may have been influenced by diplomatic relations between France and the Russian Federation. About a month before the final ruling, French President Emmanuel Macron visited the Russian President in Moscow (link). There is no substantial evidence for these claims and so far there has been no new information about the potential decision of the prosecutor’s office to appeal. After the acquittal, the Russian Federation Council met Kerimov with an enthusiastic ovation (link).

In March 2019, however, the French judge placed Kerimov back under formal investigation on suspicion of compliance in aggravated tax fraud, evidently after the prosecutor in the southern city of Nice took some additional steps in the court (link). The judge’s move to place Kerimov under formal investigation means that he becomes a formal suspect, but such investigations can be dropped without going to trial (link). Kerimov’s defense team already said that the oligarch considers the new investigation harassment. It can thus be reasonably expected that the story of dropped charges may repeat itself the second time around.

It should also be noted that Kerimov already had had highly controversial involvement in incidences of corruption. In 2012, a report by London’s The Henry Jackson Society, titled “The Shuvalov Affair,” described two major 2004 investments by Russia’s then Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov that yielded unusually high returns (link). One was a $49.5 million loan made to Alisher Usmanov to help buy a stake in Anglo-Dutch steel company Corus, the other a $17.7 million bet on Gazprom stock via Suleiman Kerimov’s Nafta Moskva.

Many experts continue to see this as a clear-cut form of bribing and money laundering between the oligarch and Putin’s top official. Shuvalov has repeatedly denied that there was anything improper or illegal about his business activities and his relationships with billionaires like Kerimov and Usmanov (link). Despite harsh libel laws, however, neither of the figures involved sued the authors of the report, preferring instead to let the news cycle die and its revelations simply be forgotten.

In April 2016, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) wrote about the Panama Papers and how they revealed Sergei Roldugin, the Russian cellist and businessman, as the secret caretaker of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s enormous wealth. OCCRP reported that Roldugin had received large sums of money from Suleiman Kerimov, using opaque financial mechanisms including offshore accounts. In two complex deals with Kerimov companies, Roldugin effectively received the rights to receive 4 billion rubles (US$ 59 million) and US$ 200 million respectively for a payment of just US$ 2 (link).

FACTORS OF COMPETITIVENESS IN RUSSIAN GUBERNATORIAL ELECTIONS, 2012-2018

ABSTRACT

Recently, the Russian regions have attracted a lot of experts’ attention. In light of stagnating economy, public dissatisfaction with the federal policies has become particularly pronounced in the regions (which tend to be poorer than Moscow), as demonstrated by Kremlin’s failures to elect several of its candidates to the positions of regional governors in 2018.

Will the Kremlin’s failures at the regional level continue this year? To answer this question, we carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of factors that have contributed to victories by the pro-Kremlin candidates in gubernatorial elections that took place in 2012-2018.

The regression analysis based on the data regarding these elections shows that the percentage of the vote gained by the pro-Kremlin candidates positively correlates with a higher turnout (which can point to a higher possibility of election fraud) and the support for Vladimir Putin in the most recent presidential election. The key finding of our analysis is the correlation between the dynamics of real disposable incomes and the voting for the pro-Kremlin candidates, which hasn’t been earlier registered by similar studies. As social and economic situation in Russia continues to deteriorate, this correlation can be expected to become increasingly stronger.

The results of our analysis suggest that the population’s declining real incomes can lead to a substantial increase in electoral risks facing the Kremlin at the regional level.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Vladimir Kozlov is a specialist in economic geography and analyst of electoral processes. Graduated from the Lomonosov Moscow State University’s Department of Geography (1977); holds a Ph.D. (kandidatskaya degree) in Economics and Social Geography (1991). In 1977-2016, worked at Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geography; from 1995 to 2016, in the Mercator Group. In 1995 through 2008, Kozlov collaborated with the Russian Central Election Committee (CEC) on visualization of the federal elections’ results and production of the series of publications titled “Electoral Statistics” on the federal and regional elections. In 2001-2008, he was a member of the editorial board of the CEC’s Journal on Elections. Contributed numerous articles on elections in the media. In 2008-2016, worked on the Mercator Group’s projects (titled “Russia in Numbers” and “The World in Numbers”) at the Russia-24 television network.

Maria Snegovaya is a fellow at the Center for International Studies and Security at the University of Maryland, as well as at Free Russia Foundation and the Center for European Policy Analysis. Holds a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and a Ph.D. (kandidatskaya degree) in economics from the Higher School of Economics. Specialist in comparative politics, international relations, and statistics. Key areas of research interest: erosion of democratic institutions, spreading of the populist and ultra-right parties in Europe, as well as in Russia’s domestic and foreign policy. Author of multiple articles published by peer-review journals; contributor to numerous media outlets, including the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the New Republic. Her work was cited by the New York Times, the Economist, Bloomberg and the Telegraph. Snegovaya regularly speaks at the U.S. universities and think tanks, including the Kennan Institute, the Atlantic Council, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work is listed in the course readings at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Science-Po), Syracuse University, UCLA, and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

Free Russia Foundation releases a translation of a report on the Kremlin’s hybrid warfare

Continue reading Free Russia Foundation releases a translation of a report on the Kremlin’s hybrid warfare →

Azov Sea Conflict: what happened and how to react

On November 25, the Ukrainian ships “Berdyansk,” “Nikopol” and “Yany Kapu,” en route from Odessa to Mariupol through the Kerch Strait, were detained by officers of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. During the detention, Russian border guards used life-threatening violence. As a result, the coast guard boat of the Russian Federation rammed a Ukrainian tug. According to the Ukrainian Navy, six Ukrainian seamen were wounded, all three Ukrainian vessels were seized together with a crew of 23 people and taken to the port of Kerch, located on the territory of the occupied Crimea on the Crimean Peninsula. Later, a Spokesman for the President of the Russian Federation announced the opening of criminal proceedings against detained sailors on charges of illegally crossing the border.

This incident became a turning point in the Azov conflict, which has been mounting over the past few months between the two countries. After the opening of the Kerch bridge, which established the road transport connection between Russia and the occupied Crimea, the Russian side strengthened its military presence in the waters of the Sea of Azov and complicated the passage of Ukrainian ships, despite the existing international treaties ensuring unhindered access of the two countries to their ports. Arbitrary detentions of Ukrainian ships, as well as the emergence of new military equipment, were regarded by many Ukrainian and international experts as a deliberate escalation of the conflict, culminating in the events of November 25.

It is important to note that the collision in the waters of the Azov Sea was the first case of open aggression of Russia against Ukraine. Despite the fact that the armed conflict between the parties began in 2014 with the illegal annexation of Crimea, and then developed in the form of military actions in the territory of Donbass, earlier Russia did not commit acts of military aggression against Ukraine under its own flag.

Andreas Umland, a German political analyst, an expert of the Euro-Atlantic Cooperation Institute specializing in Russian ultra-nationalism and authoritarianism identifies three possible reasons why such an escalation could occur right now. The first and most common version is a decrease in Putin’s rating and the need to divert attention from socio-economic problems with yet another demonstration of power. The second possible reason is the probability of the existence of the project on turning the Sea of Azov into the inner Russian sea and the desire to negatively affect the Ukrainian economy by the blockade of ports in Berdyansk and Mariupol. And the third possible reason concerns the news that the construction of the brand-new Kerch Bridge is allegedly shifted. Accordingly, a new attack could have been undertaken in order to divert attention from the news damaging the reputation of the Russian authorities.

Mikhail Gonchar, director of the Centre for Global Studies “Strategy XXI”, adds that the situation should be looked at much wider than just the conflict between the two neighboring countries. Russia claims the leading world position and in every way demonstrates to the west its strength, checking the limits of what is permitted. In addition to the Ukraine and Syria cases, as well as the case of Skripals, Mikhail also cites a recent example of failures in the GPS navigation system in Norway and Finland, which resulted in that the Norwegian frigate rammed the Finnish tanker during NATO exercises in Norway. According to the Presidents of both countries, the reason was the deliberate creation of GPS-interference from the Russian side. Mikhail Gonchar claims that Ukraine in this chain of events is just an element of a more global policy of Russia’s aggression against the West.

Further Russia goes, the more cynically and shamelessly it lies. Despite the open attack on the sea vessels of Ukraine, the ram of one of them, the opening of fire against members of the Ukrainian vessels crews, and the detention of these crews, Russia accused Ukraine of provocation and violation of the state borders of the Russian Federation and initiated an emergency session of the UN Security Council, which indeed took place on November 26. However, the members of the UN Security Council rejected the wording proposed by Russia and the session was held in accordance with the agenda proposed by the Ambassador of Ukraine to the UN.

The member states of the UN Security Council expressed their deepest concern about the events and called on Russia to immediately release the detained Ukrainian sailors and return the vessels to Ukraine. The NATO Secretary General, as well as the President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, expressed their full support for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine. The International Monetary Fund, in turn, said that it would not stop cooperating with Ukraine even if martial law was introduced.

There is no doubt that the actions of Russia fall under the definition of aggression, stipulated in Art. 3 of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) adopted on December 14, 1974 (paragraphs “a” “c” and “d”).

By its actions, the Russian side violated the basic principles of the United Nations concerning the non-use of force or the threat of force in international relations. The provisions of Section 2 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, as well as Art. 2 of the Treaty between Russia and Ukraine on cooperation in the use of the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait in 2003 were also violated.

However, since the Russian Federation is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and has the right to veto its decisions, bringing Russia to justice becomes a rather difficult task. Nonetheless, other UN member states have the legal tools for a peaceful resolution of the current situation in the framework of existing international law. However, this would require extraordinary efforts and the development of new approaches that have not yet been applied in international practice. It is entirely possible, under rule 9, to convene an emergency session of the UN General Assembly. In that case, if the GA recognizes the fact of a material violation of the basic UN principles and the fact that Russia is a party to the conflict, then guided by paragraph 3 of Art. 27 of the UN Charter and the principle “in propria causa nemo judex” the Russian side would be obliged to abstain from voting in the Security Council on the issue of resolving this dispute.

It is worth noting that according to the definition of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 23 detained Ukrainian sailors fall under the status of prisoners of war and should be subject to the rule that “no physical or moral torture or any other coercive measures” can be applied to them. At the same time, at the moment the detainees are in the status of suspects who have allegedly committed a criminal offense and, most likely, are subjected to cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment.

Even though there are still unused international legal means in the arsenal of Ukraine, many experts question their effectiveness in comparison with economic tools. Mikhail Gonchar believes that the so-called collective West has to take decisive consolidated actions necessary in order to break the chain of illegal actions of Russia both in regard to Ukraine and in relation to the entire Western world. Both Gonchar and Umland see the most realistic response to the current situation in the suspension of the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline being built from Russia to Germany, as well as the second thread of the Turkish Stream.

As for the actions of Ukraine itself, in addition to international legal instruments, it has taken unprecedented measures to ensure internal security. On November 25, 2018, the President of Ukraine convened the National Security and Defense Council, which took the initiative of imposing martial law throughout Ukraine. On November 26, a presidential decree on imposing martial law was approved by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.

On November 25, 2018, the President of Ukraine convened the National Security and Defense Council, which took the initiative of imposing martial law throughout Ukraine. For the presidential decree on the introduction of martial law to enter into force, its approval by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine is necessary.

The legal framework of the martial law is settled by International Humanitarian Law and the Law of Ukraine On the Legal Regime of Martial Law.

Martial law implies a significant expansion of the powers of state bodies, simultaneously with a significant restriction of civil rights. The restriction of the rights of persons present on the territory of Ukraine may concern almost all spheres of public life (property rights, freedom of movement, political rights, etc.). However, the text of the presidential decree introduces only a small part of the measures on martial law, whether this list will expand we will see in the future. The validity of such emergency measures throughout the territory raises serious doubts.

Special attention should be paid to the clause on a direct prohibition of elections for the period of martial law, which, given the first version of the presidential decree, meant that presidential elections already scheduled for March 31, 2019 could be delayed by at least one month. However, after a decisive protest of the deputies of the Verkhovna Rada, Petro Poroshenko changed his decision and shortened the period of martial law to one month, as well as narrowed the geography of its application to several regions.

Thus, the decree approved by the Verkhovna Rada introduces martial law in 10 regions of Ukraine from 9:00 on November 28, 2018 for 30 days to 9:00 on December 27, 2018 (the final version of the document as of November 27, 2018 has not yet been published). The President also instructed the Administration of the State Border Service of Ukraine to strengthen the protection of the state border with the Russian Federation and the administrative border with the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, and the Security Service of Ukraine to take measures to strengthen the counter-intelligence, counter-terrorism and counter-sabotage regime. The essence and limits of these measures are not yet clear; it is the responsibility of the authorities to determine this. Apart from that, the Decree contains a secret part (paragraph 12) closed for the public.

As of November 27, 2108, there were no additional restrictions imposed on persons present on the territory of Ukraine regarding their movement and stay inside the country, as well as the border crossing regime. The administration of the Boryspil airport has officially stated that the adoption of martial law will not affect the mobility of the population, and the airport will operate in a normal regime.

Soldatov and Borogan: Internet a beacon of hope for Russian civil society

Free Russia Foundation recently hosted Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, two investigative journalists from Russia who specialize in security services and internet surveillance, and sat down to talk about control over the internet in Russia, and whether independent media and civil society can prosper in an environment of growing censorship.


You have written a book about electronic surveillance in Soviet times and in modern Russia, and during the internet era. How widespread is government surveillance of the public today?

Andrei: Surveillance carried out by the Russian security services has not ever been intended for monitoring the entire population. The idea of using surveillance, the very fact of its existence, is to intimidate the public. Surveillance is only employed on people who the Kremlin perceives as dangerous – political activists, journalists, experts, people who express an independent opinion. These people may indeed be under surveillance and materials intercepted by the security services can then be used as kompromat. We’ve seen this in the case of Boris Nemtsov, Alexei Navalny and many others. But the very fact that they are being watched becomes public and later people who have no connection to the opposition or political movements will feel limited in expressing their opinion, including on the internet. As in the old days over the phone, now people are afraid to express their opinions online.

Irina: We can say that, in technical terms, the Russian security services have fallen behind, relatively speaking, compared with their American counterparts, for example. They do not have the technical capability to intercept everyone simultaneously and store this data. But since the Russian security services are not bound by oversight, the possibilities of using intercepted information for their own purposes, including that which is obtained illegally, are unlimited. Therefore, people know that if they are under surveillance – their communications are being intercepted and they are being watched – it means that some kind of repression will follow. It’s not like how the NSA gathers information on you and puts the data on hold until they might need it. In Russia, if you’re in the sights of the security services, it is very bad.

So, the SORM system* is not pervasive?

Andrei: No, we don’t have mass surveillance.

Irina: Although, they would love to have it.

Andrei: They are currently trying to create it, for example by forcing all Internet providers and operators to store data so that security services can have access to it. But there are problems with that since the country is so large that data is not stored in one place, but in different regions. It is not technically possible to analyze the whole country’s data at the same time. Therefore, they rely on targeted surveillance of people identified as potential troublemakers. But it does not work in reverse order, like how American intelligence agencies can analyze data and identify people who speak on a particular topic and then create a circle of suspects.

The Russian authorities have been successful in suppressing independent media, including through online censorship. Strict regulation of bloggers has been introduced, and the regulator Roskomnadzor can close down any online platforms on the basis of extremism and so on. But at the same time there are websites like Meduza, Alexei Navalny’s website, YouTube channel and social media available. The authorities have not been very successfully in blocking the messenger service Telegram. How do you see the Kremlin’s struggle to establish censorship of independent media and the readers’ efforts to bypass it?

Andrei: The Kremlin is bad enough in inventing ways to restrict access to information. But in general it’s very difficult to close access to opposition resources by technical means – readers can use VPN, proxies and still get access to what they want to read or see. The problem lies in the fact that for the majority of people – who do not actively seek out alternative information – the Kremlin creates technical difficulties around accessing that information. A good example of this is what happened to Telegram. People who really want to use Telegram use VPN. But a large number of people who used Telegram, but were not motivated to make a special effort to keep using it, they have left Telegram. According to some findings, up to 70% of the Telegram audience left after the service was officially restricted.

Irina: The internet is too big a challenge for the Kremlin, because it is not traditional media, where you can simply control the media owner or repress the editor in chief. This cannot be done with the internet because it is an environment where information is shared instantly and it is very difficult to control. If something happens, some kind of crisis, and people begin to share information, then it is difficult to control 1,000 users at once; it is almost impossible. The tragic college shooting in Kerch is an example of this. At first, the authorities as always began to promote a narrative that a gas explosion had occurred and that was the cause of the deaths. But the authorities did not even have time to react, as videos from the scene began to appear and it quickly became clear there was no gas explosion. The Kremlin could not stop the flow of information. This gives reason for optimism.

But if we talk about the ability of independent media to operate online, to what extent is it possible? The majority of independent initiatives seem to be based abroad.

Andrei: It’s not just that. The fact is that if you want to establish an independent media platform, you must have independent sources of funding. We now have an increase in investigative journalism. We see a lot of projects, small projects, that do very important work and they really do great investigations on very important topics. But their audiences are very small, or if they are large and considered a threat to the Kremlin, advertisers will not go to them. If you do not receive advertising revenue, what is your alternative? Subscriptions? Subscribing involves identifying users and people fear that they can be identified via the surveillance system and it can be used against them. Therefore, the problem here is not technical; it lies outside the internet. We simply cannot find a business model that would allow us to create truly independent media. So far, we Russian journalists have learned to create media outlets that provide an alternative point of view, but we have not invented models for truly independent media.

What is your prediction about whether civil society will gain strength or somehow change the situation in Russia, particularly in the context of the internet?

Irina: Russian civil society, unlike political parties, is strengthening every day. In addition to the huge number of people participating in the Navalny movement – which is not yet a political party but rather a broad movement of resistance to the Kremlin and the current government – there are a lot of volunteer movements. We have not seen volunteer movements in Russia before; this is new and the movements are coordinated via the internet. There are people helping in many areas, like organizations that help prisoners, women in trouble, disabled people, and so on. All this is civil society activity and if they didn’t have the opportunity to coordinate through the internet, there would be nothing at all. The Kremlin does not like this civic activity, but it cannot do much because it is made up of masses of people. It’s not hundreds or thousands anymore – it’s already in the tens of thousands of people.

Andrei: One of the ways the Kremlin can control the situation is to convince people that they should not engage in political and social activities. The Kremlin has always created the perception that if you have problems with the state, then you will be absolutely alone. There will be a huge Leviathan state that will simply crush you. And that indeed was the case for many years in Russia. If you were an ordinary activist – not a famous journalist or writer – and you had problems with the state, then the state would most likely crush you. What is changing now – and this is thanks to the internet – is that civil society has removed this stigma from so many topics and has created a sense of support. If a person now finds himself or herself in a difficult situation, for example by being detained by the police, there are organizations like OVD-info and dozens of others that will help you. If a person goes to prison – it is no longer as scary as it was 10 years ago because the person will not be left on their own. Even if a person does not have money for a good lawyer, there are already organizations that will find one and help him. And this is something new. It removes the stigma from so many topics, it’s not so scary anymore. It’s still scary, but not so terrible and not so final. And it does not necessarily give confidence in the future, but at least some kind of hope.

Irina: Internet spreads hope.

So despite targeted surveillance as well as self-censorship, the Russian authorities still cannot control the internet as they would like to and that gives hope for some change in terms of strengthening civil society.

Andrei: Yes, the changes are already underway.
Irina: Absolutely.
Andrei: As Irina said, civil society is growing and this cannot be stopped.
Irina: If it were a totalitarian regime, they could stop it. But an authoritarian one cannot. The regime in Russia, thank God, is not totalitarian.

*SORM – Soviet and Russian electronic surveillance system (Sistema Operativno-Rozysknikh Meropriyatiy, or System of Operative Search Measures). Russian legislation requires all of Russia’s internet service and phone providers to install a device in their lines, a black box that connects the lines to the Federal Security Services, the FSB. The FSB is then able to intercept and store communication and data.

 

Chirikova: Russian civil society needs support

Valeria Jegisman of Free Russia Foundation recently sat down with Yevgeniya Chirikova, a Russian environmental activist who currently lives in Estonia, to talk about civil society and activism in Russia – whether it can develop in an oppressive environment and its efforts are noticed in the West.

 

When the West looks at Russia, it seems that it often sees Putin and the regime, and fewer people think about civil society and activism in Russia. Does Russian activism exist?

Yes, it does and it has been growing and developing very rapidly for the last 10 years. I understand why there is such an attitude because for a very long time — in Soviet times and for a long time during the Putin regime — there was no activism like there is now. In my opinion, the rapid growth of activism began around 2010. Of course, some manifestations of activism existed before – Russia is a big country – but activism did not have a massive influence and it was not the norm. For a long time, the notion of an activist was generally negative. The perception was that an activist is not someone who is completely mentally normal — that if a person participates in activism without an order from his superiors, then there is clearly something wrong with this person. This is such a heavy legacy of the Soviet regime. So, starting from the forest fires of 2010, when people realized that they were on their own against nature because the authorities were not going to solve their problems, they began to organize themselves and solve problems independently. This gained good public coverage and in terms of timing coincided with our movement in protecting the Khimki forest.  At the time we managed to gather a large rally on Pushkin Square in Moscow – there were 5,000 people protesting. That was a lot; there hadn’t been any rallies like that in over 10 years. Later on, we managed to gather 100,000 people in support of fair elections, but in 2010 that would have been nonsense. We managed to achieve an incredible thing in the history of Russia: then-president Dmitry Medvedev said he would suspend the building of the Moscow-Saint Petersburg highway through the Khimki forest which we opposed.

I believe that activism is very young in Russia. You can see the descriptions of various forms of activism on our website, activatica.org. We created this website to support activists and we also have a database on Russian activism. There is a map there that traces various activist efforts and there are already thousands of points, where each point represents a particular undertaking. So yes, activism exists in Russia.

Why do you think activism persists despite the growing repressions and do you think it will continue to grow or not in the current political environment?

It will definitely keep growing. Putin and his regime will lose money because of the sanctions and the sanctions will continue because Putin will not give up his militarist policy. But Putin is used to living well, to buying off foreign politicians, to spending money on a repressive apparatus, on a propaganda machine and his own luxurious lifestyle. So he will need money and will extract it from people, who are basically the “new oil”. New unjust laws and decisions will be adopted, such as the Platon electronic toll road system — essentially double taxation for trucks — which provoked a powerful movement of truck drivers against the system throughout Russia and even in a region like Dagestan, which has always voted for Putin. The whole of Dagestan took to the streets against this system. Activism seemed to arise where it had not existed at all. Right now Putin’s pension reform has generated strong protests, which have taken place in 70 Russian cities despite the fact that participating can be dangerous.

I think repressions will intensify, but also as the political and economic situation worsens the number of protests will increase and the more severe the repressions are, the more brutal the protests will be.

Do you think people will overcome the fear of taking to the streets?

But they will not have any other options. It is not about overcoming something; people will be put in situations like the aforementioned truckers who just understood that they won’t earn any money and if they don’t come out to the streets, nothing will change. And they were able to achieve some change. So people will come out because of hopelessness. The Russian authorities do not leave any scope for normal, legal, peaceful problem solving – you cannot go to court, you cannot write a letter to anyone, because that will not solve your problem. By getting rid of the ways of peaceful and legal resolution, the Russian authorities end up forcing people to the street. As with the pension reform, for example, the authorities rejected a proposal from the Communist Party to hold a referendum, arguing that people are not educated enough to understand the matter. Essentially, people are capable of working until they’re 65 but they aren’t capable of understanding the question on raising the retirement age.

Do you think the authorities will make any concessions?

Of course they will, but it will depend on the strength of the protests. The more people protest, the fewer opportunities the authorities have for implementing tough measures. The government is in the process of acquiring this horrible new equipment for suppressing popular uprisings called “stena”.  And this is happening in the context of the pension reform protests; at a time when people are demanding political change. But the more people are out there, the less likely it is that the authorities will use severe methods to suppress protests.

The government runs into trouble when it makes decisions that affect a broad group of people – like the pension reform. The protests against raising the retirement age will inevitably lead to concessions. Even now, these relatively small protests have led to Putin already reducing the retirement age for women. The more the protests continue to grow, the more concessions will be made. Our authorities have a very good sixth sense and understand they can be taken out of power at one moment and they are afraid of that. But any concessions will be proportional to the efforts of the civil society.

Is it possible that the pension reforms have had such a negative effect on people that even if concessions are made, a lot of people have got a taste of activism and this could potentially lead to political change in the future?

Of course, because when a person becomes an activist, when they begin to take to the streets, they take on a different view of the state. They will begin to experience police lawlessness and they will begin to really understand what propaganda is. When a person becomes an activist, they watch TV in a different way after that, they begin to see the real picture of the Russian reality, it changes them. This does not mean that everyone will immediately become active oppositionists like Alexei Navalny, but it will definitively change their mind.

How does your website help activists?

First of all, we offer media support, including through social networks. When we first started this activity, there was very little information about activism available. Now, thank God, other projects such as ours are emerging as well and we welcome it. We are happy that this topic has become extremely popular and we feel we can be useful in supporting activists and spreading information about their activities. Sometimes spreading information is a matter of physical survival for an activist — that’s in my own biography. There were several cases when timely journalistic investigation about who has beaten up the activists helped stop the beatings and saved their lives.

The psychotherapeutic factor is important, too. It is very difficult to be an activist in Russia – everyone says at best you are crazy, an outcast and an accomplice of the United States. But when you open our website and see the map that tracks activism, you’ll see that all of Russia is actually engaged in this and you feel different. And of course, the role of our website is to unite activists so they can do joint campaigns and support each other.

Returning to the first question: If the Western world, looking at Russia, mainly sees Putin and the regime, how can it be shown that Russia – it is also an evolving civil society? How could this message be conveyed?

It is a very good question and I don’t have a clear answer. But I try to do just that, speaking at different venues about activism in Russia, and I usually surprise people. I recently spoke at the US Congress – everything I said seemed like news there. I talked about campaigns that are already 2-3 years old and I saw that it was a surprise to hear about that.

But it is actually more difficult with Europe – after the conflict with Ukraine, Europe has become more active in its purchasing of oil and gas from Putin’s regime. Germany is buying twice the amount and Nord Stream 2, led by Putin and former German Chancellor Schröder, is under way. So, the West consists of different people. For the West that makes decisions, at least in Europe, it may not even be very profitable for there to be another Russia – the Russia that exists today is very convenient as you can buy oil and gas for cheap. Of course, if something changes in Russia and another, democratic government comes to power, the first thing they will do is stop the current model for supplying gas. In Russia, 30% of people are without gas, and instead use coal for heating, which leads to catastrophic environmental consequences. Of course, Germany will cease to receive its cheap gas and Holland will not receive its cheap oil, and many will be upset. Whoever launders the money will also be upset. Take the scandal at the Estonian branch of Danske Bank, which has laundered a huge amount of Russian money. Someone gained incredible profits and this someone will be very upset if everything changes in Russia. So the West is not all about being good and it simply may not really want to see civil society flourish in Russia.

There are two trends here – there is this wonderful sale of hydrocarbons, which not only did not stop but actually increased after the annexation of the Crimea and the war against Ukraine. The West has not stopped communicating with Putin and has actually strengthened Putin’s regime with hydrocarbon money. On the other hand, at exactly the same moment as the annexation of the Crimea, when the “law on foreign agents” was adopted in Russia, the West and Western donors stopped helping civil society due to fear of these laws. Thus, the nascent Russian civil society was left without support. And it is a good question: how can we change this situation? We need to combine our efforts somehow and I am very glad that Free Russia Foundation has also become engaged with issues of activism.  It seems to me that it is necessary to organize more conferences and events through joint efforts.

I would also note that I have more events in the States than in Europe, which is very disappointing because Europe is closer to us and it could share experience and knowledge. But even in America it is becoming more difficult, especially after Trump was elected. I sense the donors have problems with helping Russia. It feels like the help they try to provide is being blocked, whereas the interactions with Putin’s regime seem to continue.

The interview took place on 20 September 2018 in Tallinn, Estonia. Photo credit: wtaq.com

Natalia Arno

Board Member (ex officio)

President, and Founder of the Free Russia Foundation

Natalia Arno is the founder and President of Free Russia Foundation, created in 2014 after she was exiled from Russia for her pro-democracy work. As a result of having to deal with the personal tragedy of losing her homeland, Ms. Arno used her first-hand experience to build an organization that would speak out in Western capitals for those facing repression back home, and to offer her support and guidance to those working toward a free and prosperous Russia. In forced exile since 2012, she became aware that the regime of Vladimir Putin had pushed out hundreds of thousands of talented, educated Russians who shared her vision for a free and democratic Russia, upholding human rights and seeking to rejoin a global community of respected nations.

Ms. Arno has more than 17 years of experience in providing organizational support, training and advocacy on behalf of pro-democracy Russians. Prior to founding Free Russia Foundation, Ms. Arno planned and executed countrywide programs in the fields of education, grassroots organizing, civic education, party building, women and youth leadership, civil society development, and local governance during her tenure as the Russia Country Director for the International Republican Institute where she worked from 2004 to 2014. In 2008, she was appointed the IRI Country Director for Russia, the post she held until 2014.

Ms. Arno was born in a Siberian region of Buryatia where she attended college, graduating from the Buryat State University with a master’s degree in Linguistics in 1998 (Diploma Cum Laude). Between 1998 -1999 she worked as Professor of English at Buryat State University. In 1999, Ms. Arno moved to Moscow to pursue postgraduate studies at the Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Science, and between 2000-2003 she worked as a Linguistics Professor at the Modern Humanitarian University in Moscow.

Ralf Fücks

Board Member

Former President Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, former Co-President of the German national Green Party, and author

Ralf Fücks, a German national and politician, has focused his career on sustainable development, reshaping the welfare state, migration, and foreign policy. From 1996 to 2017, he and his colleagues rebuilt the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, which facilitates green ideas and projects, promotes democratic ideas, and supports immigration and gender equality. Fücks was largely responsible for the formation of the foundation’s domestic political education, the divisions of Europe and North America, and the German-Israeli-Relations.

Fücks began his career when he joined the Green Party in 1982 and in 1985 he was elected to the Bremen state parliament. He continued to work with the Green Party and served as Co-President in 1989 and 1990, during which he advocated for the reform of the Green Party and coalition governments with the social democrats. In 1991 he returned to the state Bremen government and served as the Deputy Mayor and as Senator for Urban Development and Environmental Protection until 1995. 

During his time at the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, Fücks co-authored the new party program for the Green Party which was adopted in 2002 and wrote his own book “Intelligent Wachsen – Die grüne Revolution” (Intelligent Growth – The Green Revolution). 

Tuula: I hope Oleg will win

Valeria Jegisman of Free Russia Foundation caught up with Maxim Tuula, producer of “The Trial: The State of Russia vs Oleg Sentsov,” during his recent visit to Washington, to talk about the film, the international campaign to support the political prisoner, attitudes towards his case in Russia, and the current state of Sentsov’s health.


The film was released about 1.5 years ago. While you were working on it, you probably had your goals and expectations. Do you feel you have achieved them? Apart from Oleg still being in jail.

When we were making this film we wanted to bring the message about Oleg Sentsov’s case to the widest international audience possible. After a premiere in Berlin, some Russian film critics – friends of ours – told us they didn’t really like the film because they expected more. Since most of them support Oleg Sentsov and know a lot about his case, they expected some kind of revelations. But we didn’t make the film for them. We made it for people who don’t know about Oleg’s case. We wanted to make an internationally relatable film to explain everything and I think it works.

In terms of creativity, I don’t know – for the sophisticated taste it’s not an intricate arthouse film. It’s too simple for that, but we had to choose one way or another. I asked Natalia, Oleg Sentsov’s cousin, whether she liked the film or not, and she said she didn’t think about it in artistic terms, but that it is an important tool to help Oleg’s cause.

However, after our premiere in Berlin, Netflix was looking at the film and whether to take it and they decided not to. And a lot of European channels didn’t take it. They said the film is not relevant to their audiences because it’s Ukraine, and no one knows who Oleg Sentsov is. That is unfortunate.

So it must have come as a disappointment?

Of course we were disappointed because we wanted to make it as big as possible. But we are trying, maybe things will change. When we were making the film, we started a publicity campaign where we recorded messages from European, Russian, and Ukrainian filmmakers to support Oleg’s release. But it was really hard to get feedback from their American counterparts.

Many of them said that they had never heard anything about it and asked why they should care about a Ukrainian filmmaker? Something changed when Johnny Depp joined another global campaign, Imprisoned for Art, and supported Oleg Sentsov. And thanks to Pen America awareness of Oleg’s case has risen in the States.

After the hunger strike began, the American media started writing more about Sentsov, especially after Masha Gessen, the Russian-American journalist, wrote about him in the New Yorker. Her participation in our film screening in New York a few weeks ago attracted a lot of interest and it helped raise awareness.

It seems to me that the international campaign has been quite prominent and far-reaching. A lot of people, including from film industry and international organizations, support Oleg Sentsov’s case. But what is less prominent is political support. What do you think about this and what else can civil society do to put more pressure on politicians?

The Institute of Documentary Film in Prague asked me what they could do to help – should they write an open letter to the Russian Minister of Culture, or to President Putin? But I told them they [Russian authorities] don’t care about you. The only thing you can do is try to make an impact by talking to your politicians, who in turn may try to influence Putin.

French President Emmanuel Macron raised the issue of Oleg’s case during his recent visit to Russia, probably because the French intelligentsia exerted pressure by signing a letter in support of Oleg. Yet it did not lead to any results because Putin was not interested. The president of European Council, Donald Tusk, issued a statement calling for the release of Oleg because our Polish co-producer Dariusz Jablonski and director Agnieszka Holland wrote a letter to Tusk. But again, it didn’t have any effect.

The Czech Institute of Documentary Film asked me what they could do to help and I said the same thing: you need to write the politicians. They showed Oleg’s own film, Gamer, and our film about Oleg at a festival in Karlovy Vary and then wrote an open letter on behalf of all the Czech filmmaking associations to the Czech Parliament, which eventually took up the matter. But again these were cultural figures raising the issue, not the parliament itself.

Of course, there are politicians who are very active in supporting Oleg – for example, the former Bundestag member Marieluise Beck, who even came to our Berlin premiere and was an active participant of our other German screenings. Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid also took part in the interantional campaign and she held a #FreeSenstov sign in her hands – but I wish there were more of them.

Putin will not listen to the Institute of Documentary Film, but he might listen to someone who has an impact on Russian or international politics. So, high-level politicians could probably influence Putin, but he would want to get something in return.

Did you expect that the World Cup would bring more attention to Oleg Sentsov’s case?

This is what Sentsov was hoping for when he started the hunger strike. He started his hunger strike just few weeks before the World Cup to attract attention to the Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Our friends in Moscow were handing out leaflets to the soccer fans who came to Russia. We thought that if even five out of a hundred fans took the leaflets, and started to think about it, then that’s something. Unfortunately, nothing happened. The World Cup and the case of Oleg Sentsov turned out to be two different universes, not really connected to each other. But let’s see what happens after the end of the World Cup, there is still hope that Putin will do something.

In the film, Oleg Sentsov says that the majority of the population in Russia believes the state propaganda, but one-third understands what is really going on. So the majority of people believe that Oleg is guilty, but there are those who try to stand up for him in Russia. It must take courage to do that in Russia. How do you assess the support for Oleg in Russia?

Well, I think one-third is an exaggeration and that it’s much fewer people, but still this is the thinking part of the Russian population, people who really question the order of things. The Russian filmmakers, they continue to support Sentsov because they feel the blame is partly on them since this is their government who is doing this, yet they can’t do anything about it.

There is a documentary made by Radio Liberty that shows activists handing out leaflets about Oleg to people on the streets of Moscow. Many people don’t take the leaflets, those who do don’t really want to know anything about it. They also say they won’t take one because he is Ukrainian. When they see the word Ukraine, they don’t even read it because it is the enemy – they are so brainwashed.

But the worst part is when people clearly understand what is going on, but close their eyes to this injustice.

Do you think they are just afraid to stand up, or that they just don’t care?

They are not afraid, they work for the regime. They support Putin, if it works for Putin, injustice is not a problem to them. Maybe some people are afraid, but I don’t think fear is the main factor here.

Once I happened to have a conversation with a former FSB officer who said it’s Sentsov’s own fault because he didn’t have to stick out. He clearly realizes Oleg is not a terrorist and that it’s a show trial. But it’s normal to him, it is normal to many people. It’s all right to have this kind of injustice if it has a purpose. And for me that is the worst part.

How is Oleg Sentsov’s health at the moment, do you keep in touch with him?

It is deteriorating, of course, because it’s been 61 days. At this point, the changes in your body become irreversible. Even if he stops the hunger strike, he may not fully recover. He has lost about 20 kilograms and his health is clearly deteriorating.

I’m going to ask a difficult question and you don’t have to answer it. Do you think Oleg did the right thing to go on a hunger strike?

It is his choice and I respect it. There is a discussion among Russian filmmakers about whether we should ask for a pardon from Putin or should not because we have to respect his decision. I respect his choice, and I wouldn’t convince him to stop. I wouldn’t do it myself because my family just wouldn’t let me, because it is a serious risk I would be taking. But he is absolutely convinced he is going to win and I hope Oleg will win. In any case, he has achieved what he was trying to do. He has brought attention to the issue of Ukrainian political prisoners, but if he has to pay with his life – it is a very high price.

Maxim Tuula is an Estonian film producer whose work also includes “My Friend Boris Nemtsov.” The interview with Tuula took place on 13 July 2018. Photo credits: snapshot from “The Trial: The State of Russia vs Oleg Sentsov,” and Alexei Salomatov

Toomas Hendrik Ilves

Board Member

Former President of the Republic of Estonia, former Member of the European Parliament, former Ambassador of the Republic of Estonia to the United States of America, Canada, and Mexico, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University,  co-chair of World Economic Forum Blockchain group, board member of Munich Security Conference advisory board

Toomas Ilves is an Estonian politician, diplomat, and journalist who served as the fourth President of the Republic of Estonia from 2006-2016. Before his terms as President, Ilves served as Ambassador of the Republic of Estonia to the United States of America, Canada, and Mexico 1993-1996, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Estonia, 1996-1998 and 1999-2002, a Member of the Estonian Parliament 2002-2004, and as a member of the European Parliament where he was Vice President of the Foreign Affairs Committee 2004-2006. 

Throughout his career, Toomas Ilves has advocated and supported digital independence and security through his creation of large-scale digital projects that empowered the people of Estonia and his work in cybersecurity with the World Bank’s World World Development Report 2016, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Cyber Security, and through his current position as a board member of the Munich Security Conference advisory board.

Ilves began his long and contributive career with teaching, researching, and writing for various groups and institutions such as Columbia University and Radio Free Europe. He has continued to publish and write, primarily in Estonian and English, but also Finnish, Latvian, Hungarian, and Russian. His works have been recognized and honoured by many groups and institutions; in 2017 he was awarded the World Leader in Cybersecurity Award by Boston Global Forum and earlier in 2014 he was awarded the Freedom Award by the Atlantic Council. 

Ilves received his Masters in psychology from Pennsylvania University in 1978 and his Bachelors in psychology from Columbia University in 1976. 

Last Address: a civic initiative to commemorate victims of Soviet repressions 

On Monday, June 4, the Kennan’s Institute, a Washington-based think-tank, organized a panel to introduce “The Last Address” project – a civic initiative to commemorate the victims of repressions in the Soviet Union which originated in Russia and is gradually spreading to other countries. The panelists talked about the origins, success, and challenges of the initiative.

Continue reading Last Address: a civic initiative to commemorate victims of Soviet repressions  →

A Timeline: The Making of Boris Nemtsov Plaza

On May 5, 2018, following the Congressional Review Period, the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Act of 2018 (D.C. Act 22-276), passed by the Washington D.C. City Council and signed by Mayor Muriel Bowser, became official law, permanently establishing Boris Nemtsov Plaza to honor the Russian opposition leader assassinated in 2015. Nemtsov Plaza is directly in front of the Russian Embassy.

The establishment of Nemtsov Plaza is an exceptional achievement that brought together a diverse cross-section of leaders joined by a common set of values, a common vision for a free Russia, and a common outrage over the murder of the country’s most prominent and effective advocate for freedom. World Affairs publishes the timeline of the making of Boris Nemtsov Plaza to establish a permanent record for the effort, as well as to pay tribute to World Affairs blogger and friend, Vladimir Kara-Murza, who played an indispensible role in designating Nemtsov Plaza as part of his continuing efforts to commemorate his friend and colleague.

-The Editors

February 27, 2015
Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is assassinated on Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow, steps away from the Kremlin.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Vladimir Kara-Murza, June 6, 2016

June 6, 2016
Vladimir Kara-Murza, longtime friend and colleague of Nemtsov and chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom, meets with Senator John McCain (R-AZ) to discuss the idea of naming the street in front of the Russian Embassy in Washington D.C. to honor Boris Nemtsov.

December 21, 2016
Vladimir Kara-Murza meets with Jamie Fly, Counselor for Foreign and National Security Affairs for Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), to discuss the idea of naming the street in front of the Russian Embassy in Washington D.C. to honor Boris Nemtsov.

February 26, 2017
Bethany Poulos, Legislative Assistant to Senator Rubio, delivers the Senator’s message at a rally in front of the Russian Embassy in Washington D.C. to mark the second anniversary of Boris Nemtsov’s assassination promising to “continue working to ensure Boris’ legacy is never forgotten.”

February 27, 2017
On the second anniversary of Nemtsov’s assassination, Senator Rubio introduces bill S.459 “to designate the area between the intersections of Wisconsin Avenue, Northwest and Davis Street, Northwest and Wisconsin Avenue, Northwest and Edmunds Street, Northwest in Washington, District of Columbia, as ‘Boris Nemtsov Plaza’.”

February 28, 2017
Senator McCain cosponsors S.459.

Vladimir Kara Murza, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), March 13, 2017

March 13, 2017
Vladimir Kara-Murza meets with Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, to discuss the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation. Senator Johnson cosponsors S.459.

March 15, 2017
Op-ed by Vladimir Kara-Murza in the Washington Post on the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation. “There will come a day when Russia takes pride in having Boris Nemtsov’s name on its embassy letterhead,” Kara-Murza wrote. “It will also be grateful to those who, in difficult times, did not allow it to forget.”

Senator Christopher Coons (D-DE) cosponsors S.459, becoming the first Democrat to support the legislation.

March 16, 2017
Vladimir Kara-Murza meets with Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) to discuss the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

March 20, 2017
Vladimir Kara-Murza meets with Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) to discuss the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

Evgenia Kara-Murza, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), March 30, 2017

March 30, 2017
Vladimir Kara-Murza and his wife Evgenia meet with Senator Rubio to thank him for his leadership on the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

April 3, 2017
Representative Ros-Lehtinen and her Democratic colleague, Representative Eliot Engel (D-NY), introduce H.R.1863, the House counterpart bill to S.459 on the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), April 4, 2017

April 4, 2017
Representative Peter Roskam (R-IL) cosponsors H. R. 1863.

Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN) cosponsors H. R. 1863.

Vladimir Kara-Murza meets with Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) to discuss the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

April 5, 2017
Senator Durbin cosponsors S.459.

April 13, 2017
Vladimir Kara-Murza is interviewed on Sky News about the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

April 24, 2017
Senator Wicker cosponsors S.459.

Vladimir Kara-Murza meets with the staff of Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) to discuss the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

May 4, 2017
Representative Gerald Connolly (D-VA) cosponsors H.R.1863.

Representative Mark Meadows (R-NC) cosponsors H.R.1863.

May 10, 2017
Senator Shaheen cosponsors S.459.

May 17, 2017
U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs marks up S.459. The legislation passes unanimously.

June 5, 2017
Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) cosponsors S.459.

June 7, 2017
Representative Peter King (R-NY) cosponsors H.R.1863.

June 26, 2017
S.459 is favorably reported by the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs without amendment; S. Rept. 115-119.

S. 459 is placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar under General Orders. Calendar No. 156.

July 11, 2017
Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, places a hold on S.459.

July 25, 2017
Vladimir Kara-Murza meets with the staff of Senator Corker to discuss the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

July 27, 2017
Senator Rubio meets with Senator Corker to discuss the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

August 2, 2017
Vladimir Kara-Murza meets with Senator Corker to discuss the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), Vladimir Kara-Murza, August 2, 2017

August 2, 2017
Vladimir Kara-Murza meets with Senator Rubio to discuss further steps with regard to the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

August 9, 2017
Conference call between Bethany Poulos, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Zhanna Nemtsova (Boris Nemtsov’s daughter) with Nicole Rentz, Legislative Director for D.C. Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), to discuss the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

September 14, 2017
Vladimir Kara-Murza, Nemtsov family attorney Vadim Prokhorov, and Free Russia Foundation President Natalia Arno meet with Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO) to discuss the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation.

September 15, 2017
Zhanna Nemtsova sends a letter to Senator Corker asking him to lift the hold on S.459 and allow the bill to proceed on the Senate floor. “All public initiatives for an official commemoration of my father… have been blocked by the Russian authorities,” the letter read. “I hope Mr. Putin does not have a similar veto in other countries. S.459, a bipartisan measure, is not directed against anyone. Its aim… is to commemorate a Russian statesman who gave his life for the freedom of his country.” The letter receives no response.

September 19, 2017
Senator Gardner cosponsors S.459.

October 23, 2017
Meeting between Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), Vladimir Kara-Murza, and National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman to discuss the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation. Delegate Holmes Norton offers her support for the initiative and asks the D.C. Council to take the lead.

October 31, 2017
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) and Councilmember Cheh introduce B22-0539, the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Act of 2017, “to symbolically designate the unit block of Wisconsin Avenue, N.W., between Davis Street, N.W., and Edmunds Street, N.W., in Ward 3, as Boris Nemtsov Plaza.”

The meeting in Senator Marco Rubio’s office to discuss the next steps on the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation. Participants include (L to R) Vladimir Kara-Murza, Senator Christopher Coons, Senator Rubio, D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, and D.C. Councilmember Mary Cheh. November 1, 2017.

November 1, 2017
Meeting in Senator Rubio’s office convenes Senator Rubio, Senator Coons, Chairman Mendelson, Councilmember Cheh, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Bethany Poulos, Senator Rubio’s Senior Foreign Policy Advisor Robert Zarate, and others to discuss the Boris Nemtsov Plaza designation and further actions by the D.C. Council to enact the legislation.

November 7, 2017
B22-0539 referred to the D.C. Council’s Committee of the Whole. Sydney Hawthorne, Legislative Counsel to the Committee, is the lead staff member on the legislation.

November 30, 2017
In its editorial the Washington Post backs the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Act and calls upon D.C. Councilmembers to demonstrate “that they are less intimidated by Mr. Putin than are their counterparts on Capitol Hill.”

D.C. Council, Committee of the Whole, hearing on the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Act, December 6, 2017

December 6, 2017
Public hearing on B22-0539 in the D.C. Council’s Committee of the Whole. Vladimir Kara-Murza and Nemtsova testify in support of the bill. “The Russian authorities are fighting Boris Nemtsov even after his death,” Vladimir Kara-Murza said at the hearing. “The Moscow city government has rejected all public initiatives for a commemoration… Several times a month, always in the middle of the night, the Moscow municipal services pillage the [makeshift] memorial on the bridge; grown men in uniforms stealing flowers under the cover of darkness.” Nemtsova expressed “profound gratitude to Members of the D.C. Council” for the initiative to commemorate her father. Councilmember Cheh called on her colleagues “to show solidarity with those around the world who make the extraordinary effort—under adverse circumstances, including risking and losing their lives—to try to bring democracy to their people.”

Senator Rubio (R-FL) applauds the D.C. Council for taking up the Boris Nemtsov Plaza legislation and thanks Chairman Mendelson and Councilmember Cheh “for leading this effort at the city level and bringing it closer to a reality.”

December 19, 2017
D.C. Council’s Committee of the Whole marks up B22-0539; the vote is unanimous in favor of the initiative.

January 3, 2018
D.C. Council’s Committee of the Whole files the report on B22-0539.

D.C. Council meeting, January 9, 2018

January 9, 2018
D.C. Council unanimously approves B22-0539 on the first reading. The Council also approves the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Emergency Declaration Resolution of 2018 and passes the Boris Nemtsov Designation Emergency Act of 2018 (D.C. Act 22-0235) to ensure that the designation becomes effective before February 27, the third anniversary of Nemtsov’s assassination.

January 10, 2018
Senator Rubio applauds the D.C. Council for passing the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Act. “I thank Chairman Mendelson and Councilmember Mary Cheh for their leadership,” his statement reads. “Starting on the third anniversary of Mr. Nemtsov’s assassination, there will be a sign in front of the Russian Embassy to remind Vladimir Putin and his cronies that they cannot use murder, violence, and intimidation to silence dissent.”

January 25, 2018
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) signs D.C. Act 22-235, the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Emergency Act of 2018.

February 1, 2018
Free Russia Foundation President Natalia Arno obtains a permit from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department to hold the public unveiling ceremony for Boris Nemtsov Plaza on February 27.

February 6, 2018
The D.C. Council unanimously passes B22-0539 on the final reading.

L to R, back row: Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), Vladimir Kara-Murza, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), Zhanna Nemtsova, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI)
L to R, front row: Daniil Kara-Murza, Sofia Kara-Murza, Ekaterina Kara-Murza, Senator Christopher Coons (D-DE), D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), Free Russia Foundation President Natalia Arno

February 27, 2018
On the third anniversary of Boris Nemtsov’s assassination U.S. government officials, Members of Congress, D.C. Council leaders, foreign diplomats, as well as friends and family of Nemtsov gathered to witness the unveiling of Boris Nemtsov Plaza in front of the Russian Embassy, the world’s first official memorial to the late Russian opposition leader. The ceremony is attended by Senators Rubio, Coons, Wicker, Johnson, as well as Representative Ros-Lehtinen, Delegate Holmes Norton, Chairman Mendelson, Councilmember Cheh, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Wess Mitchell, Zhanna Nemtsova, Boris Nemtsov’s first wife Raisa Nemtsova, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Natalia Arno, Vadim Prokhorov, and others. Senator McCain and Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD) issue statements on the unveiling. “This commemoration will not be removed. This commemoration will stay here. It will always be here as a symbol and an honor to Boris Nemtsov,” Cheh said at the unveiling. “Let them steal the candles, let them steal the flowers, they can never steal his memory.” Senator Rubio thanked the D.C. Council for its “extraordinary efforts” in making Boris Nemtsov Plaza a reality. “For me as a Russian citizen there can be nothing more patriotic than to name a street in front of the Russian Embassy after a Russian statesman,” Kara-Murza said at the ceremony. “I know that one day the Russian state will be proud that our embassy in Washington is standing on a street named after Boris Nemtsov.” Nemtsov’s goddaughter and Kara-Murza’s younger daughter, Sofia, pulled the cord to unveil the sign reading “Boris Nemtsov Plaza.”

March 8, 2018
Mayor Bowser signs B22-0539 as D.C. Act 22-276, the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Act of 2018.

March 16, 2018
D.C. Act A22-0276 is published in the D.C. Register (Vol. 65/11).

March 26, 2018
D.C. Act A22-0276 is transmitted to the U.S. Congress for the mandatory 30-day Congressional Review Period.

April 9, 2018
The D.C. Council passes the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Congressional Review Emergency Declaration Resolution of 2018 and the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Congressional Review Emergency Act of 2018 to ensure the emergency designation remains effective until the permanent legislation is in place.

May 3, 2018
Mayor Bowser signs the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Congressional Review Emergency Act of 2018.

May 5, 2018
Following the mandatory 30-day Congressional Review Period the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Act of 2018 (D.C. Act 22-276) comes into effect, making the street designation permanent. The Act, under Law Number L22-0092, is transmitted back to the Council.

Economic stagnation widens gap between Russian authorities and people

On Friday, May 18, Free Russia Foundation and Atlantic Council organized an expert panel to discuss the politics and economics of Vladimir Putin’s fourth term as president. Experts expect further economic stagnation, with no structural economic reforms in sight, and discussed the growing gap between the Russian government and citizens.

Continue reading Economic stagnation widens gap between Russian authorities and people →

Russia has fundamentally changed after 2014

Valeria Jegisman of Free Russia Foundation, sat down with Alexandr Morozov during his recent visit to Washington, D.C., to talk about Russia’s political system and future, the impact of sanctions against its elite, and the changes taking place in Russian society.

 

Beyond 2024

“Putin is not going to change the constitution [to get rid of term limits],” says Morozov, while also ruling out the creation of a Chinese-style state council that would allow Vladimir Putin to rule for life as its head. It is more likely that Putin will find a successor, he says, a young and loyal bureaucrat – not someone from the old guard. “Whatever position Putin is in, he will remain the real shareholder of this political system,” says Morozov, adding that whoever becomes Putin’s successor will lack any political independence.

During the intermediate period of 2008-2012, when power was temporarily handed over to Dmitry Medvedev, there were hopes he would offer an independent alternative. But post-2014 Russia is very different, says Morozov. The annexation of Crimea and growing tension with the West has led to a strong mobilization of the Russian society, and Putin’s successor will face resistance to any kind of change from the entire establishment. “Therefore, Putin has a simple scheme ahead of him – in 2024 he can transfer power to someone else, and then later return,” Morozov says.

Yet Russia is no longer dependent on a particular leader such as Putin, says Morozov, as society has fully accepted the underlying system of governance. Russia’s political system has deteriorated into a form of Eurasian autocracy, says Morozov, something is seen in Central Asia and Azerbaijan. This system can go on in perpetuity since any change in the system would require completely remaking many fundamental issues.

Any attempt to reform the system from within is perceived as subversive by society itself, which has come to terms with various constraints, says Morozov. “This is not the Kremlin pressuring society, as it was before 2014 when the Kremlin was manipulating various social groups to hold them in subjection. This is no longer a problem for the Kremlin – the submission of society is completely voluntarily.”


The West is no longer a model

Russian society no longer sees the West as its political, social or cultural model, as it did 20 years ago. “It has not become an enemy of the Russian people in the full sense of the word,” says Morozov, “but it has crumbled in their minds.” Many ordinary Russians have been to Western countries and they have come to believe that the Western way of life is just one model – not a superior one – while Russia and other non-Western countries have their own models. And similar to Erdogan’s Turkey, those who disagree can leave, and the rest of society will carry on.

The new system is not simply the result of a post-Crimean mobilization. Putin has been successful during his previous terms and during the recent election in providing a comfortable social contract to the main societal groups. For example, in Putin’s annual state-of-the-nation address on March 1, it was clear to millions of people employed in the infrastructure and construction industries that a vote for Putin would bring good employment opportunities and incomes for them and their families in the coming years. The same goes for the military and defense industry, where millions of people work, and the agricultural sector, which expects growth as a result of sanctions and import substitutes. Meanwhile, the elderly are given pension increases, the younger generation is given the opportunity to get involved in urban development, and young bureaucrats are given career prospects in public service. The dissatisfactions and tensions among different societal groups – inherent to any society – have therefore been successfully managed by the Kremlin through these various promises.

Whether there are enough resources to fulfill the election promises is another question, but society has taken the offer.


The younger generation and the Russian opposition – any hope for change?

The younger generations, who grew up not knowing any other leader than Putin (and nominally Dmitry Medvedev), are very patriotic and it appears they would rather have a “young Putin” than a new political system. There is no evidence or data from social research that shows that the new generation wants to radically reform the political and social system, says Morozov. By voting for Ksenia Sobchak, they are just voting for someone younger, yet essentially still a representative of the same system. And many probably see a “younger Putin” in Alexei Navalny, too.

“Young people expect that they will be co-opted, that the politics will be inclusive of them, and that Putin’s establishment will give them a chance in life,” says Morozov. He notes that many people in their thirties and forties hold key positions in government, and those in their twenties expect to have career opportunities. Putin’s bureaucrats are undergoing a rapid rejuvenation, says Morozov, and this is very different from Brezhnev’s era when regional and federal officials were all in their sixties and seventies.

Meanwhile, the Russian opposition is often accused of not being able to reach an agreement among themselves, says Morozov. He finds that the main problem is that the ideas of liberal values that originated in the 1990s have exhausted themselves, and not only in Russia. Across Europe, for example, the leaders of Velvet Revolutions are in the minority, says Morozov.

An additional challenge for the Russian opposition is competing with the promises Putin makes to society and coming up with an alternative to Putinism. This is something Alexei Kudrin and his Center for Strategic Research have been working on: trying to convince some of Putin’s bureaucrats that even minor changes could achieve some kind of development towards democracy and freedom. Yet the anti-Putin movement in Russia is very small and “can only fight for self-preservation,” says Morozov. The Putin opposition in Russia and abroad must come up with new ideas for a transition – it is no longer enough to say we propose a European model of development, says Morozov. “For example, there has to be changed in the military, which employs 4 million people. If they say they want to change, then something can significant happen.”


Sanctions on the mafia state

Morozov says sanctions are important, as they have a clear goal: the West wants Putin to end his interventionism abroad and his propaganda. However, sanctions have little impact on internal politics. They do not seem to have worked on ordinary people, who are convinced that Russia is on the defensive against the West. The Kremlin’s propaganda has worked well; it has persuaded all levels of Russian society, including the well-educated, that if the West imposes sanctions, it is an act of economic war against Russia and Russian companies.

There is no reason to expect that this will split the elites, says Morozov. In the last ten years, there has been a transformation within the so-called “oligarchat”. Those who oppose Putin have left Russia, and those who have stayed are deeply co-opted in the system. “They have made their choice,” says Morozov, “they must carry their fate to the end with Putin.”

Putin’s Russia is essentially a mafia state, says Morozov. It is organized in a similar way, with Putin’s underlings enjoying relative freedom, so long as they don’t challenge the leader. This does not necessarily mean that Putin is always aware of or agrees with all the activities of the various factions, but he is their guardian. If Putin had clearly stated that he would investigate one incident or another and that the perpetrators would be punished, there might not be such a big problem, says Morozov. But Putin defends everyone connected to Putinism.

This became especially clear after the shooting down of the Malaysian Boeing in 2014, and since Crimea, there seems to have been other groups that have carried out “uncoordinated” actions. Morozov says, “Putin believes that the West is waging a war against him, and Russia is certainly in a weaker position militarily and economically.” This is the basis, in Putin’s mind, for legitimizing the activities of those who are part of his system, even when he does not approve of their actions. According to Morozov, Putin and the Security Council of Russia frankly believe the Boeing was shot down accidentally, that Skripal’s poisoning is a provocation against the Kremlin, and that the recent chemical attack in Syria did not happen and is being used as a pretext by the West to intervene in Syria.


What else could the West do?

Firstly, says Morozov, the West could ramp up sanctions, so Russia would focus on its internal affairs and development instead of malign activities abroad. Sanctions should also be imposed on companies – and there are around 20 of them – that are involved in recruiting mercenaries in Russia for activities in Ukraine and Syria. Furthermore, sanctions should be brought against journalists who actively generate Kremlin propaganda on Russian state TV and against organizations which co-opt Western politicians to advocate the Kremlin’s views. The latter leaves the impression in Russia that the West shares the Kremlin’s views, thus strengthening propagandistic messages.

It is also important to support groups of Russian intellectuals who might provide the answer to Russia’s future. There is also a need for closer monitoring of human rights abuses in Russia, perhaps through the creation of new institution, since Russia’s nuclear capability and UN membership means it should be under greater scrutiny and pressure.

U.S. Imposes New Sanctions on Putin Cronies

The Trump administration imposed new sanctions on seven of Russia’s richest men and 17 top government officials on Friday in the latest effort to punish President Vladimir V. Putin’s inner circle for interference in the 2016 election and other Russian aggression.

Continue reading U.S. Imposes New Sanctions on Putin Cronies →

Putin’s Wunderwaffe

The times are changing and so is Russian President Vladimir Putin.  Back in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin was inebriated with the unexpected astounding success of his Crimean operation and gutless response of the West. He had never expected that his action in Ukraine, which was intended to keep this country in the Moscow’s orbit of corrupt regimes, would trigger such a great wave of nationalistic exaltation in Russia which would turn him into a semi-mythical figure, a hero who came to restore Russian national might and glory.  Even the liberal opposition and imprisoned leftist leaders unanimously joined the ecstatic crowd praising the Putin’s action.  Never in the long history of his reign, Putin could feel so close to claiming the title of Russian Messiah.

However, with the Ukrainian gamble, the Russian President has opened a can of worms.  The nationalistic paranoia lifted the lid and any hint of stepping back in front of a foreign enemy would provoke a charge of high treason and accusations of being a fake Messiah.

Meanwhile, after such a promising beginning dubbed the “Russian Spring,” a chain of misfortunes and failures followed.  The majority of ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine remained loyal to their country and rejected Putin’s siren songs of the “Russian World.”  As a result, the ambitious project of “Novorossiya,” which implied the territorial grab of a half of Ukraine all the way from Kharkiv to Odessa, shrunk to a puny sliver of land in the east of Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists. No less misfortunate was Putin’s venture in Syria, which was supposed to distract national attention from the failure in Ukraine.  After declaring three times victory and withdrawal of Russian troops from Syria, Mr. Putin had to face the music of the Deir ez-Zor debacle, were more than three hundred of Russian fighters were killed in February by the U.S. artillery and aircraft (by the way, if confirmed this number exceeds all the Soviet losses in clashes with Americans during the entire Cold war.)  Finally, the hated Anglo-Saxons began to threaten Kremlin with a seizure of multiple assets in the West, which belong to Putin’s close friends and relatives:  only in the U.S., these assets’ combined value exceeds $1 trillion. Closeness to Putin becomes toxic for Russian elites.  Their bitter disappointment with Putin echoes with the deep discontent of Russian nationalists, who volunteered in great numbers to fight in Ukraine and now feel betrayed.  Their spokesman, Russian fascist philosopher Alexander Dugin ceased praising Putin and reversed his position on the President.

Russia-watchers have noticed, that whenever Putin feels he is in trouble, he tends to disappear for a long time.  This happened when Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was killed, and the pattern was repeated after the Deir ez-Zor disaster when Putin “got cold” and was absent for two weeks (officially, he got sick for the first time in 18 years of his presidency.)

He came back with a new agenda for the rest of his presidency for life.  Until recently, the Putin we knew was trying hard to reach a deal with the West, a sort of a new version of Yalta.  After being kicked out from G-8, Putin’s active meddling in Syria, North Korea and elsewhere had only one message to the Western leaders: you need Russia (and me personally) to tackle  these problems, bring me back to the club of world leaders as an equal partner and recognize my absolute dominance over the zone of my exclusive interests ( at least in Ukraine and the rest of the post-Soviet space)  It seems that now he has abandoned this futile hope and moved to the “Russia as a sieged fortress” scenario.

Now he wants a confrontation with the West, from this day on he is willing to crank up the level of risk and is much more dangerous than he used to be.  This agenda will help him to unite the «elites» around himself and keep the power for life.

But what resources besides unique Russian spirituality can he use to confront the NATO alliance, which is many times stronger than Russia economically, militarily, and technologically?

Actually, Putin has a Wunderwaffe, and he has displayed it in a number of interviews earlier this month.  Of course, we are not talking about ridiculous videos he showed in his address to the Federal Assembly.  Putin’s wonder weapon is his nuclear blackmail, his willingness and readiness to strike first, his complete disregard of the value of human lives, both Western and Russian ones, which he has repeatedly shown before.

Lately, he has incessantly and with gusto repeated with graphic detail depiction of him personally launching a nuclear attack against the West.

His blatantly defiant poisoning of a fugitive Russian spy with a chemical weapon was the first step in his special operation to prolong his presidential term through the rest of his life.  He has deliberately left plenty of evidence to state urbi et orbi: I, Vladimir the Terrible, did it!

By doing this Putin killed two birds with one stone: the level of confrontation with the West went sky-high, while the world starts to believe that he really is a monster ready to use the weapons of mass destruction.

Nord Stream 2: commercial venture or political tool?

U.S. and European experts weighed the political and business implications of Nord Stream 2 at an Atlantic Council event in Washington on Monday, March 12.

Continue reading Nord Stream 2: commercial venture or political tool? →

Andrew Wood

Board Member

Former UK Ambassador to Yugoslavia, former UK Ambassador to Russia, Adviser on Russian affairs

Sir Andrew Wood is an expert on Russia and has acted as an adviser on Russian affairs to multiple enterprises since his retirement from the diplomatic service in 2000. From 1995-2000 he served as the British Ambassador to Russia and he had earlier served in Moscow from 1964-1966 and 1979-1982. Between two of his tenures in Russia, he served as the British Ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1985-1989. Wood is also an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia programme. 

Prompt and coordinated action needed to fight disinformation, experts say

The Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think-tank, has presented a report outlining ways to counter disinformation.

Continue reading Prompt and coordinated action needed to fight disinformation, experts say →

Growth unlikely in the weak Russian economy

On Tuesday, March 6, the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think-tank, organized a panel discussion on the state of the Russian economy. Panelists discussed sanctions, a perceived brain drain and the absence of meaningful reforms in President Putin’s recent annual address.

Continue reading Growth unlikely in the weak Russian economy →

Boris Nemtsov Plaza Unveiled in Washington, D.C. 

The Boris Nemtsov Plaza was unveiled during a ceremony in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Feb. 27. A part of Wisconsin Avenue from Edmunds street to Davis street, directly in front of the Russian Embassy, has officially been renamed in honor of the prominent Russian opposition leader who was shot dead in 2015.

Continue reading Boris Nemtsov Plaza Unveiled in Washington, D.C.  →

Tom Firestone

Board Member

Tom Firestone is the co-chair of the firm’s White Collar & Internal Investigations practice and a member of the firm’s National Security/CFIUS/Compliance Practice Group. He specializes in complex transnational investigations and international risk management and represents companies and individuals before the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the Department of Treasury and other U.S. agencies.  His matters often involve the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and other sanctions laws, the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and other anti-money laundering laws, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), and other federal criminal statutes related to business crime and national security. He regularly advises clients on the Russia/Ukraine crisis including helping them with issues related to sanctions compliance, obtaining OFAC licenses, and the risks of doing business in Russia. He has also represented individuals in proceedings before Interpol and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). He also regularly advises foreign governments on issues relating to anti-corruption and the rule of law. He also advises clients on risk and compliance in the cannabis industry.

Tom previously worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, where he specialized in the investigation and prosecution of transnational organized crime.  While with the Department of Justice, he also served as the Resident Legal Advisor and Acting Chief of the Law Enforcement Section at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and twice won the U.S. State Department Superior Honor Award.  He has testified as an expert before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and the UK House of Lords and is recognized by Best Lawyers in America in the area of white collar criminal defense.  He is fluent in Russian and reads Polish and Bulgarian.

Tom frequently comments on matters related to white collar crime and compliance. He also hosts The New Cold War: Risk, Sanctions, Compliance, a podcast explaining the convergence of national security and law enforcement through conversations with leading experts from the worlds of business, politics, journalism and academia. He has published and lectured extensively on the Russia/Ukraine crisis and anti-kleptocracy.

Atlantic Council panel disappointed with “Kremlin report”

Experts gathered at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think-tank, have expressed disappointment in the U.S. government’s “Kremlin report” which was released earlier this week, calling it “puzzling and inexplicable”.

Continue reading Atlantic Council panel disappointed with “Kremlin report” →

U.S. releases names in “Kremlin report,” but classified material raises questions

On Monday night, Jan. 29, the U.S. Treasury Department publicly released its much-anticipated “Kremlin report,” which singles out members of the Russian political and business elite with close ties to Vladimir Putin’s government.

Continue reading U.S. releases names in “Kremlin report,” but classified material raises questions →

Sarah Mendelson

Board Member

Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy and Head of Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College in Washington, DC

Ambassador Sarah E. Mendelson served as the US Representative to the Economic and Social Council at the United Nations until January 20, 2017.

Confirmed by the Senate in October 2015, she was the USUN lead on international development, human rights, and humanitarian affairs. There she oversaw campaigns to get country-specific resolutions passed in the General Assembly and to get NGOs, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, accredited to the UN. She led efforts to elevate the issue of combating human trafficking and was senior lead for the President’s Summit on Refugees.

Prior to her appointment as Ambassador, she served as a Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID from 2010-2014 where she was the Agency lead on democracy, human rights, and governance. A long time policy entrepreneur, she has spent over two decades working on development and human rights as a scholar and practitioner including in Moscow with the National Democratic Institute, on the faculty of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and over a decade as senior adviser and inaugural director of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. There she also worked as a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program where she over saw focus groups, public opinion surveys, and social marketing campaigns in Russia on a range of issues.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of over 70 scholarly and public policy publications, Ambassador Mendelson received her BA in History from Yale University and her PhD in political science from Columbia University.

Nuclear Coercion to “Yalta”

The deeper Russia plunges into its current morass of economic, social, and political problems, the more sophisticated is its art of manipulating Western minds with esoteric ploys. It conveys the message that “without us, you cannot address the challenges you face” while at the same time creating or enhancing these very same challenges itself for its own corrupt interests.

It was back in 2013 that the Kremlin’s propaganda and its agents of influence first used the mantra “you’d better be good and cooperate with us, or else terrorists will continue to attack you” when the Tsarnaev brothers fashioned crude explosive devices out of pressure cookers to bomb the Boston marathon.  American prosecutors, journalists, and politicians haven’t bothered to probe for the truth about the Tsarnaevs.  In fact, “The Boston bomber was armed a long time ago.” Before he committed his act of terrorism, the elder Tsarnaev in 2012 spent eight months in Russia, all the while closely monitored by the FSB.  Although the Russian security agency in its correspondence with their U.S. counterparts assessed this young Chechen as an Islamist, Tsarnaev traveled to Russia via Moscow’s main airport, Sheremetyevo, without being held up.  He would never have done so without being sure he could travel there safely. Most likely he was visiting his friends and handlers, who would eventually send him back to the U.S. for his meeting with destiny.

The Boston tragedy has opened a new chapter in the history of the Kremlin’s psychophysical impact on the Western establishment and society. Instead of sporadic ad hoc active measures, Kremlin operators have developed and activated an emotionally loaded concept of systemic zombification of the West.

Post-Boston, and following every major terrorist attack in the U.S., France, Germany, and Great Britain, Moscow has sent the message “You either cooperate with us, or terrorist bombings will continue on the streets of your cities.”

The notorious Russian propagandist Sergei Markov spelled out just what Moscow means by  “cooperation”: “The conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine should be immediately halted. The gang that came to power in Kiev should be replaced with a technocratic government, the Ukrainian Constitution should be amended, and the neo-Nazis should be removed.  The dictatorship in Kiev is one of the main obstacles for the joint U.S.-EU-Russia’s fight against terrorism.”

After the terrorist massacre in Paris, Russian Ambassador to the E.U. Vladimir Chizhov complained that “unfortunately, one terrorist attack in Paris might not suffice to give European leaders the correct consciousness and strategic vision”, and even Russian Prime-Minister Medvedev clearly stated that the terrorist attacks in the EU and the rest of the world are occurring because the West is trying to isolate Russia.

What the Kremlin is offering the West is protection against future terrorist attacks – but with a caveat.  It is an open secret that Moscow has a network of agents among jihadis and has a certain influence on their leadership.  This network is made up by people recruited by the KGB back when the Soviet Union supported “national liberation movements,” as well as by former Iraqi military officers trained in the USSR (who became the backbone of ISIS), and by a new generation of warriors from the Northern Caucasus and other regions of Russia willing to die for Allah.  The FSB provided the latter group Russian passports and helped them reach the Middle East.

This caveated “cooperation” touted by the Kremlin, in essence, amounts to a new “Yalta” agreement:  recognition of delineated spheres of influence and of Moscow’s exclusive rights over former Soviet republics. The West is to be intimidated, cajoled, and corrupted to the point that it ceases support for breakaway republics (such as Georgia and Ukraine) and escorts them back into the zone of the Russian kleptocracy’s privileged interests.

These are the goals of the hybrid World War Four declared by President Putin against the West and his stated terms of surrender.  To come to power, Putin went to the extent of blowing up apartment buildings in Moscow and other Russian cities in 1999.  To convey to Americans the urgency of this “cooperation” with the Kremlin, Putin and his FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov dispatched the elder Tsarnaev brother back to the U.S.

The Obama’s administration was aware of the Boston terrorist attack’s circumstances but refused to face the truth since it was too frightening and implied very serious consequences.

The next Kremlin’s operation pursued the goal of bringing to the White House the candidate willing to repeat incessantly: “We need Russians to fight Islamic terrorism together.” The resounding success of this operation turned into a disastrous failure for the Kremlin. Its masterminds failed to understand the U.S. political system and its multilayered system of checks and balances.  It was a Pyrrhic victory: any hint of pandering to Russia by the new administration met a fierce resistance of the American establishment.

Congress almost unanimously endorsed “An Act to Counter Aggression by the Governments of Iran, the Russian Federation, and North Korea,” and on August 2, President Trump reluctantly signed it.  Essentially, this legislation outlawed the entire Russian leadership as a criminal group and froze all its loot pillaged in Russia that had been stashed in the U.S.  FinCEN was tasked with identifying all assets of the Russian ruling elite in the U.S., starting with Putin. Once these results are presented to the public, the Anti-Money Laundering and Proceeds of Crimes Acts will be applied to these assets and their owners. If and when this occurs, it will radically transform U.S. relations with the Putin kleptocracy.

It seemed like a breakthrough in the World Hybrid War: no new “Yalta” is looming on the horizon, while the noose of sanctions, which implies among other things the forfeiture of “Putin’s Trillion,” is tightening on the neck of the Kremlin kleptocracy.  To change the dynamics of the game Putin, played his newest card: his Excellency, Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the United States of America, Four Star General Anatoly IvanovichAntonov (who was included on the sanction lists of EU, Ukraine, and Canada for Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.)

Ambassador Antonov was sent to crank up the level of political blackmail.  His task is to coerce his new country of residence to “Yalta” and to dissuade it from touching Kremlin slush funds. Apparently, he will not fall back on the old tsarnaevesque boogeymen of terrorists with IEDs. His argument will be the threat of nuclear apocalypse in the U.S.

In his remarks to the World Affairs Council in San-Francisco on November 29, and at Stanford University December 1, the Russian Ambassador touted Moscow’s influence on the North Korean leadership, asserting repeatedly that without Russia’s assistance, the U.S. won’t be able to protect itself against the North Korean nuclear threat.

“Russia is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and the world’s second-largest nuclear power. We are ready to offer our assistance in negotiations with the DPRK, as we too are concerned about the growing nuclear potential of North Korea. Likewise, we can help the United States in its fight against ISIS, and in regulating Iran’s nuclear program.”

There is no question, but that Moscow has a great deal of influence on Pyongyang. President Putin tirelessly lobbied for the North Korean nuclear missile program on the world stage: “they would rather eat grass then give up their program.” With each new leap of the North Korean missile/nuclear progress, experts have ever diminishing doubts about Russia’s crucial role in this Pyongyang’s astonishing progress.

The new Kremlin operation is an improved rerun of the Cuban Missile Crisis scenario. Unlike 55 years ago, Russia is today in a much better situation, since it bears no responsibility for its latest ‘nuclear offshore,’ but it is offering the U.S. its magnanimous assistance – for a price, of course.  Back in 1962, JFK declared “… any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against… the United States [will require] a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

At that time, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev did not have the chutzpah to respond in the manner of, “We are ready to offer you our assistance in negotiations with Cuba, as we too are concerned about the growing Cuban nuclear potential.”

Last week Putin lavishly praised President Trump’s achievements in his first year in office. Trump immediately called him back to express his gratitude.  Putin aptly used the opportunity to repeat the offer of Russia’s potential contribution to solving the North Korean nuclear crisis, which his ambassador had already delivered in California.  As a former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper succinctly stated: “Putin is a great case officer, and he knows how to handle an asset and that’s what he’s doing with the President.”

Washington bill would rename street by Russian Embassy after Boris Nemtsov

On Wednesday, Dec. 6, the Council of the District of Columbia held a public hearing on renaming a street in front of the Russian Embassy on Wisconsin Avenue to Boris Nemtsov Plaza, a gesture to honor the memory of Boris Nemtsov, the Russian opposition leader who was shot dead in Moscow in February 2015.

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How to Identify the Kremlin Ruling Elite and its Agents

The Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think-tank, has proposed a set of criteria as the U.S. government compiles a list of corrupt Russian individuals and businesses with ties to the Kremlin.

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Prospects for Russia’s Democratic Movement

DC – September 13, 8:30-10:00 am, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Free Russia Foundation, and the Institute for Modern Russia invite you to a discussion on Prospects for Russia’s Democratic Movement.

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Stanislav Shalunov

A Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur, a network protocol expert.

He is the creator of Ledbat (an Internet architect who designed the new congestion control in BitTorrent), co-founder and CTO of FireChat, a proprietary mobile app, which uses wireless mesh networking to connect without an internet connection by connecting peer-to-peer.

Russian Refugees in Ukraine: The Broken Hopes

Right after Putin’s third term, and especially after the Maidan revolution in Ukraine followed by the Russian annexation of Crimea and the subsequent military conflict in Eastern Ukraine, the Russian authorities dramatically increased the anti-opposition campaign.

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Putin’s new hostages

Oleg Sentsov and Oleksandr Kolchenko were singing the Ukrainian anthem when their trial was over.

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Independence carries a high cost

To be honest, neither August 24, Ukraine Independence Day, or June 12, Russia Independence Day, carried much importance for me.

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PUTIN’S CULT OF PERSONALITY

Even Vladimir Putin’s most passionate defenders do not deny that he now has a personality cult, but even his most committed critics acknowledge that such a cult is not an explanation but rather something that must be explained, all the more so because the Putin cult did not emerge full-blown all at once but rather has emerged and evolved over the last 15 years.

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MH17 and what could have been

One year ago marks the tragedy of Malaysia Airlines Flight #17. It departed from Amsterdam en route to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014.

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No justice for Srebrenica. Russia vetoed the genocide resolution

Russia vetoed the UN resolution calling to recognize Srebrenica massacre as a genocide.

Between July 11 and July 13 of 1995, Europe witnessed a horrific event in its Balkans region, the worst since the Second World War.

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Movements

Movements

Putin. War. The first presentation in the States

Free Russia Foundation has presented the English version of the Putin. War report based on materials from Boris Nemtsov.

The English version has been released to the public at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC. The event was attended by representatives of Russian and Ukrainian communities, international organizations, think tanks and journalists.

The report was presented by Ilya Yashin, one of the leaders of Russian opposition, companion of Boris Nemtsov and editor of the report; and two co-authors of the report: Sergey Aleksashenko, leading Russian economist, nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings and Leonid Martynyuk, Russian opposition activist, co-author of last Nemtsov’s reports.

“This is the first public presentation in the U.S of open source material proving the Russian military’s direct involvement in Ukraine. It puts to rest the charade Putin has been playing with the West and indeed his own citizens who overwhelming don’t want Russia at war with Ukrainians. It’s important for this news to be made public as European nations and the U.S. consider continuing sanctions and financial and military assistance to the Kiev government. The authors of this report, dedicating it to the memory of Boris Nemtsov, have exposed themselves to grave risks to present their findings to the world. We owe it to these brave people to examine their report closely,” said Natalia Arno, president of Free Russia Foundation regarding the significance of the report.

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Boris Nemtsov, the Russian opposition leader murdered in Moscow three months ago, was the primary author of “Putin. War.” The report covers the facts of the story that state-run propaganda denies and scoffs at. The Kremlin’s war in Ukraine costs Russia hundreds of soldiers’ lives. And those in power are painstakingly trying to hide it from the Russian people. The report was finished by Nemtsov’s team after his death, published posthumously in Russian and presented in Moscow on May 12.

Please read and share the report.

Free Russia Foundation will organize two more public presentations of the report in Washington, DC and New York City.

NEVER AGAIN? OR OVER AND OVER… Russia celebrates the Victory day

Yesterday Russia solemnly celebrated the 70th anniversary of the victory in the most horrible and deadliest war in its history. That war took millions of lives, destroyed half of Europe, and completely changed the world order, affecting everyone’s life and outlook in some way.

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The Bolotnaya case. Three years with no right for justice

May 6, 2015 marks the third sad anniversary of the events on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow.

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Call to cancel Dugin’s presentation at Texas A&M Univesity

Free Russia Foundation calls for the cancellation of the  presentation of notorious Russian ultra-nationalist  Alexander Dugin at Texas A&M University.

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Anti-Putin protesters in New York put Putin behind bars

NYC – Earlier today, members of the Russian-speaking diaspora and Ukrainian activists living in New York demonstrated at Union Square against the political repressions in Russia and against Putin’s military aggression towards Ukraine.

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An In-Depth Look into Savchenko’s Fate

WASHINGTON-April 16, representatives of Free Russia Foundation met only a stone’s throw from the White House to discuss the legal situation now facing Nadezhda Savchenko.

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The only Russian MP who voted against annexation of Crimea loses his immunity

In a move that surprised few Russian observers, the State Duma (Russian Parliament) voted to strip away parliamentary immunity from Duma member Ilya Ponomarev.

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Justice for Journalists