This was drafted in March 16, 2022 and then not published for some reason, I suppose because so many Russian colleagues were shushing me and seemed to NEED Ovsvyannikova's story to be "true" in order to encourage other establishment media figures to break with the regime.
I hope they're past that now, although I know a few who are not.
***
I'm happy to go on record as a skeptic of the dramatic story of the top Russian domestic propaganda channel airing a staged one-woman picket with a sign "It's all lies!" as a Kremlin kukla anchor droned on about glorious Russian troops liberating grateful Ukrainian villagers.
Everybody is trying to parse the story of Marina Ovsyannikova who staged the anti-war protest on live TV. Was she a false flag op? What happens to her next will tend to confirm her authenticity -- or not. Currently she's missing. If she recants on state TV tomorrow...
So Ovsyannikova, the TV1 gal, is trending on Moscow Twitter https://t.co/En1AzwUZAi I continue to believe this story is a bit of chum that too many people have bit down hard on, and will come to regret it. The question is: whose chum?
The questions to ask aren't about whether it was a real live broadcast -- as a former producer explains, and as I can confirm having worked at one time as a translator on the local
public television station that broadcast Russian state news (fortunately a failed Polish entrepreneurial project), it was live and she really did pop in like a Saturday Night Live skit (and hey, where is that SNL skit imitating this stunt?!).
The next scene to which they cut which contains medical personnel in a hospital corridor isn't some rich Aesopian message but merely the next story in the queue. So let's take that off our list of queries. It was live, and that was not the point. Yes, it really was live, guys. But not any more, as now there is a report from an independent journalist formerly of BBC and Meduza (so really, really independent!) as well as a former Lenta.ru journalist that TV1 now has a one-minute time delay to ensure that sort of thing never repeats.
Was It Stage-Managed By More Than the Protester?
Could it, even live, have been stage-managed? I think there was signs that it was, but the question is, by whom? And for what purpose? For you to even know about this stunt, there had to be at least two other people involved, many more -- the person who filmed her pre-recorded message, and the person who ensured it got maximum play on first Russian, then world social media.
So it was managed, but was it a 360 degree Kremlin propaganda package micro-managed by FSB psy-war specialists? Not likely.
As one colleague asked, how would any kind of Kremlin false-flag op involving this hitherto unknown TV1 propagandist serve Putin's agenda? It can't look good for Putin if his often pre-recorded but still loyalist-while-live national TV broadcasts can be invaded by spontaneous anti-war solo picketers of the kind routinely dragged away by their arms or legs or hair from anywhere near Red Square or indeed any public square. Although solo pickets are technically allowed under the Russian law on demonstrations -- we can expect a "spontaneous" redaction of this law soonest to specify "without media present" -- thus ending the scores of blurry and crooked camera-phone arrest photos on the pages of my still remaining Facebook friends from Russia. A mobile phone that can reach 2000 people on social media can be characterized as media that failed to register under the Russian press law.
It might be easy for a formerly loyal TV worker drone to pop up with a protest, but how will she ensure that it is taped, and that this message gets out to the world (the capacity for snuffing out such an event is enormous as I will explain later.
She Had Help
Here, she obviously had help -- she planned the action, she made a pre-recorded message to release after her expected arrest, and was able to quickly get it to Ksenia Sobchak , usually described as a "media manager and socialite," the chief "sort of" opposition TV personality. Sobchak was the ideal link for such a caper because while she has at times had her shows canceled, she always seems to get a new one, and has hung on to her access as the daughter of the former mayor of St. Petersburg. Whoever gave it to Sobchak would be an acquaintance who could vouch for its authenticity so that she could instantly put it on her Telegram channel called "Warning, News!" which has 1.49 million subscribers. Telegram is the venue of choice for Russian message-sending from all quarters as it is quasi-independent, not technically part of the Kremlin media empire, but not part of the now-banned Western empire of Facebook, Instagram, etc. (My many questions over the years about all the fairy dust sprinkled on Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, and all his works I will save for another day.)
From Telegram, the haven of news junkies for whom even mainlining Twitter is never enough, it reached mainstream media. Yesterday, Marina was a top trend on Moscow Twitter; today she's gone.
Sobchak isn't exactly a figure to inspire hope in Ukrainians or long-time Russian activists -- some felt she seemed more upset about losing her YouTube channel revenue than the deaths of people in Ukraine. (Of course, every impression like this has to be researched to see if in fact she attempted more protest but was smothered.) The operative point is that Sobchak is connected yet relatively free to speak out and make the synapse jump between the communities of TV propagandists and establishment social media critics -- and reach the Western media. Yes, you can find screenshots of Sobchak's loyalist "Krym Mash" (Crimea is Ours") sentiment on Twitter which she may have deleted, but it should be seen in context of all her statements on Crimea still standing. which is still critical.
So the questions I've said needed to be asked now are not "was it live" or "did someone choreograph it" but chiefly: why was she released from lock-up?!
Two Court Cases
In an unfolding story like this, many Russia-watchers like to one-up you with late-breaking news that appears to undo your theory, i.e. the fine point that she is technically facing two court cases. One is a charge under the administrative code Art. 20, very frequently used for tens of thousands of anti-war protests, for unauthorized picketing. As a first-time offender, that got her only 30,000 rubles ($280, but possibly half that by the time I finish typing this sentence given Russia's near default under sanctions). It might have been 3 days or 15 days but wasn't, but she faces another charge for "organizing an unauthorized mass protest" -- obviously if you appear on national TV, even as a solo flyer, it can become "mass".
It didn't. Novaya Gazeta, a leading independent paper barely hanging on when others have closed published a picture of the incident with the text of her sign blanked out. But people even with blank posters, or just literally the phrase "Two Words" (hinting at "no to war" which is just to words in the Russian language) are dragged away commonly if they don't have a permit -- which are not always granted and if given, forced on the outskirts of town, far from view.
But in addition to the charges that seemingly led to a mere slap on the wrist, she faces more serious charges that could lead to 5-10 years under Art. 207 of the criminal code, according to an independent lawyer.
There is an old Soviet joke about how people were free to protest on Red Square. It's just that they weren't free afterwards. So what happens to Marina O. afterwards is the space to watch.
Such lawyers are not saying her case will fall under the new draconian law about disparaging the "special operation" which is punishable by 15 years. But we don't know yet, really, what her case will involve by the time it gets to court again.
Her act becomes more understandable -- and possibly even more important -- if it is the tip of an iceberg involving sub-rosa mass protest of some kind within state TV walls.
There are reports of other state TV resignations or slow-downs, some less visible, even if during a work shift, others through sick-outs. Maybe we will see mass firings of the disloyal, or even just two dismissals and arrests -- as with the FSB operatives responsible for the war in Ukraine recently -- or maybe we will see mass resignations, but so far -- not.
And far from actually explaining away the mystery of her release (only one of her cases was heard in court; the other is pending) the fine point only ADDS to the mystery -- with TWO cases, how on earth can she released from Matrosskaya Tishina, the prison I translate as "Sailors' Haven," which some frightened protesters manage to signal to their families by posting an innocuous phrase to social media or a DM to friends like "Enjoying a walk around Moscow" -- but with the location clearly visible on the cell phone message. How?
You don't even have to wonder about her perfectly put-together foreign-made outfit and make-up after two sleepless nights or look to see if she is wearing Louboutins like in the Leningrad video; you can just ask why she wasn't held like scores of other famous or unknown people with several charges like this who are *kept in jail*. And the fact is, like so much that goes on in Moscow, we don't know and I personally think it's ok to be skeptical and have questions.
Disappointing Heroines
You can skip ahead to more current concerns but it helps to understand that very few heroes from Russia and this part of the world in general live up to the expectations of their Western -- or even Eastern -- admirers.
If you accept such stories as authentically sincere and heroic, you can be very disappointed later. I'm old enough to remember the dramatic story of Nadiya Savchenko, the Ukrainian pilot who was Joan of Arc, Amelia Earhart, and Nadezhda Popova all rolled into one, whose release from Russian prison came after a surge of sustained world-wide protest, but who wound up with a ruined political career when she went to negotiate with the leaders of the soi-disant People's Republic of Donetsk and even less disant Luhansk Democratic People's Republics, and was willing to give up Crimea to stop the war. And I speak as someone who went over every inch of ground on the road to Luhansk from every available footage of the scene on the bridge where Igor Kornelyuk, a Ukrainian-born state TV anchor without a bullet-proof vest, and other crew members were killed by Ukrainian shelling as they were being taken around by DNR fighters, in an effort to exonerate Savchenko from the claim that she was the military spotter who guided the mortar fire on to the Russian TV group -- a charge I think can be demonstrated as false.
So you do have to ask the age-old Leninist question of "who profits," as well as look for the Louboutins. And even if the TV1 worker drone's stunt is thoroughly authentic and had help from genuine opposition/newly former establishment quarters, it is still possible for Putin not only to make lemons from this lemonade but to totally sugar the pitcher.
In the grand picture, as Ukrainians have pointed out, for at least two days, hopefully not more, the world was riveted to the absorbing tale of a brave Russian woman standing up against the war machine, and didn't see small towns that most of the world had never heard of until now essentially falling to the Russians, despite brave Ukrainian resistance battles still ongoing.
Here’s my prediction for #Ovsyannikova thread. You will forget about Chernihiv, Sumy, Mariupol, Bucha, Irpin, Kherson, Kharkiv, and Kyiv... & will be too busy discussing how near is the end of totalitarianism in Russia when a propagandist does an anti-war performance. Wanna bet?
#notallrussians#WARINUKRAINE So about this "live performance". It looks like one NO WAR poster (for English-speaking Russians, I presume) is enough to make it all about good Russians suffering while Mariupol is just being destroyed, nothing serious. Masters to shift the blame. pic.twitter.com/8MpNAIBqMg
I could add that as an extra bonus from the Kremlin propagandist perspective, if you were a Fox News supporter and Trump voter, you were distracted from perhaps changing your mind over the death of a Fox News reporter in Ukraine, the other brave journalist story of the hour. It's not "genius". People are getting killed.
Do Russians Suffer?
Some Russian friends are ranting at me that I am heartless to be skeptical of Marina, a mother of two children facing serious jail time, but I'm dry-eyed -- Ukrainian mothers of two are being killed under Russian artillery fire -- along with their two children. Let's be crystal clear about who is suffering the most here. As someone who has spent my entire life helping Soviet and later Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Central Asian dissidents of all kinds to escape imprisonment, their countries, and their language limitations, I get to do that. All kinds of people are needed to make up successful anti-war movements in any country, including our own. Some people will be willing to pound Trident missiles or chain themselves to embassies and face jail time for "civil disobedience" (although I find the concept of what that involves less coherent in our time); others may only light a candle and put it their window. All levels of activism have to be accepted to succeed.
And you do have to be brave in Russia and take risks. Even so, I don't think fear of imprisonment or old age is an excuse for a prominent figure like historian and author Edvard Radzinsky to low-ball his response to the war; I don't see liberal science leader Evgeny Velikhov, said to be ailing, even with a poster saying "War is Unhealthy for Children and Other Living Things" -- remember that witless wonder of the 1960s? -- although he was well enough to step out and receive his Order of Labour star from Putin recently. There is an awful lot of veniality and shocking distortion of universal principles and outright support of the war in Russia that seems needless even to keep one's job (100 rectors isn't all the rectors in Russia -- do we see a lot of names from the North Caucasus on this list, for example?)
It's sad that the emblematic "Kremlin establishment figure breaks with the establishment" is more riveting even than the Ukrainian grannies hurling canned tomatoes at the occupiers or farmers towing away disabled BTRs but that's how life works. It's even more riveting than highly visible Russian public personalities in the music and arts industry opposing the war in February -- nobody in the West knows these people, by and large. These people have -- had -- millions of fans and are now non-people.
Tens of thousands of Russians have been willing to sacrifice their freedom, even if only for a few days or weeks, or their jobs or their school placements to protest this war, with 1/100th the attention of Ovsyannikova, and that burns for a lot of us, for example, who saw the sainted Svetlana Gannushkina spend her 80th birthday in jail for an anti-war vigil , for example, who, despite being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her work with refugees within Russia's empire, is unlikely to own a suit like Ovsyannikova's or apply her make-up for the cameras quite as expertly Ovsyannikova after sleepless nights at the precinct.
The Propaganda Pickles in the Brave Club Sandwich
There are aspects of this story that don't hold up to scrutiny -- at least now -- although that doesn't mean it was scripted at the Kremlin as a 4D chess move and false-flag oppo to confuse those rooting for Ukraine and a few brave Russians by smuggling in the message of Ovsyannikov's pre-recorded message: that "the Russian and Ukrainian people are one."
They aren't.
This thesis, rooted in her own personal origins both in Russia and Ukraine, is genuinely held by many post-Soviet people of mixed parentage and life experience but it really is not how to understand this war. It's not "fratricidal," as eloquent as the sign of one Russian personality -- "Cain, where is they brother Abel?" The war in Ukraine is an international war crime by a terror-state against a people struggling to break free of the Soviet past and integrate with Europe.
This poem made into a song will help you out with understanding this.
Russia is huge -- YUGE as Trump might say. But Ukraine is great -- as in valorous.
As great and powerful as it is, Russia clearly isn't winning this war -- at least not yet -- and that's important to grasp.
I believe the way to understand the war in Ukraine is that it is not always Putin and Surkov and Zolotov puppeteering the events -- they can only fit so much puppeteering in a day's work, and Surkov seems to have been furloughed from his puppeteering duties. But all kinds of other actors may bid for their patronage or even manipulate those at the center of power in the Kremlin, whether a pro-Russian oligarch like Akhmetov who is denounced by Ukrainians in Kyiv but who back in 2014 put his coal miners on the streets in patrols in Mariupol to keep the Russian "little green men" out and his millions intact, or the unfortunate bejeweled woman mayor of Slavyansk with a Russian side hustle who went to jail, or Odessa trade union leaders who stockpiled food, medical supplies and weapons in the trade union building days before the soccer fan marches ended in clashes between Ukrainian nationalists and pro-Moscow Russian speakers, culminating in a fire killing 46. Or even Ukrainian army officers with cross-river smuggling operations willing to kill their own.
Many DNR and LNR leaders were assassinated but were home-grown and more possibly killed by local rivals, not Moscow-run saboteurs, like the mayor of Luhansk who came up through the KGB-run Soviet sports mafia. If the theory is that the GRU kills all their operatives who "know to much," you have to ask why the mainland Russian FSB collaborators like Col. Strelkov or Alexander Borodai (who got his career started at the White House siege in 1993) are now safely back in Moscow making the talk show circuit on creepy semi-Orthodox/semi-Slavic pagan YouTube channels.
Various local and national pro-Kremlin factions made their attempts on Kharkiv, Mariupol, and Slavyansk in 2014-2015 and were beaten back, with Ukraine holding these cities all these years, but now I don't need to explain what has happened to them. The land bridge to Crimea is shaping up. Sometimes Moscow crushes resistance; sometimes not. Sometimes that resistance is real, but the people involved are no Andrei Sakharovs.
Inside the sprawling Kremlin complexes of the presidential administration and the power ministries, not everything is hand-scripted by Putin, who reportedly does not use a cell phone or computer, as Oliver Stone once unwittingly revealed in one of his enthusiastic agit-prop movies.
One thing that was useful about the much-aligned Steele memo, which we covered in exhaustive detail in an 80,000 word piece cut for space that showed where statements were wrong or misleading, and where they might be right but unconfirmed, is that it confirms the saga of how the Kremlin first influenced the domestic parliamentary elections, then later the US and other foreign elections, by running it out of the Presidential Administration, not the GRU or FSB as such. The maestro of this effort, Volodin, was then moved to the position of speaker of the supine Russian parliament, along with other apparatchiks far less visible and known. Putin apparently didn't trust his own FSB to do the job and when it was finished, those in the know from the PA weren't defenestrated, but they were moved to influential, but less powerful positions.
We saw how Sergei Naryshkin, head of the SVR or Foreign Intelligence Service, was humiliated on national TV when he began to stammer and bumble the script, speaking about how the DNR and LNR should be "incorporated into the Russian Federation," a remark that brought a nasty smile to Putin's lips, because the cover story was that these "republics" had "declared their independence" -- although many of its assets were already stripped, including entire factories whose equipment was hauled to Russia. There are obsequious oligarchs and KGB yes-men around Putin and his lovely former bodyguard Viktor Zolotov, now head of the Rosgvardiya or National Guard (whose main mission is to crack the heads of any protesters), who recently received a "protective icon" from the utterly compromised Patriarch Kirill on Russian Orthodox TV, which is helpfully named Soyuz (Union) so you can understand its mission better in reconstructing the Russian World or Greater Russia that once made up the Soviet Union.
So as I noted I think it's likely there is an inside faction around the center of power that is angry and scared about the loss of their privileges and riches -- all tied to the perfidious West -- and doesn't want to spend decades under war communism.
This faction wants to show it is safe for elites to protest -- this faction will work the courts to ensure light sentences like fines still payable on seemingly banned credit cards -- to ensure more protest, as mass protest is one way to end this war with Putin's demise.
But this faction is still careful to include in this message the thesis that "the Russian and Ukrainian people are one" to keep the shaky alliance of pro-Kremlin insiders and top influences of the masses on board. Some Russians are joking that Konstantin Ernst, CEO of Channel One is going to emerge and say in fact she was fired last week and has a visa application to France. Ernst was included in EU sanctions along with Roman Abramovich last week before the prime-time protest; maybe he's in on it; maybe he will be fired -- who knows? Who was the camera person for her pre-recorded video statement? Ksenia Sobchak was the first to post her pre-recorded video address on Telegram; how did Ovsyannikova get to her? These are questions asked by the English-language edition of NV (New Voice of Ukraine), a business paper which I don't think of exactly a bastion of anti-Russian resistance, but ok.
They published a complete English translation of Ovsyannikova's pre-recorded speech, which is accurate, where those getting into the weeds could wonder why only Putin alone is singled out for blame, when an entire literal army and numerous supporting propagandists and enablers are responsible for this spectacularly evil war, and that budgets willing, an entire cast of characters should go to the Hague and be prosecuted for perpetrating it.
They can also wonder about Soviet catch-phrases like "fraternal peoples" which is a code phrase justifying the Anschluss of Crimea. Does Marina O., like Navalny and other Russian opposition leaders whose dissent ends at the border, favour keeping Crimea? Whatever Putin's lackeys turned possible coup-plotters want, it won't involve letting Crimea go.
Speaking of Navalny, who is lucky to be alive after the assassination attempt against him with nuclear warfare, who had a certain amount of clout in his day and garnered 30% of the Moscow mayoral elections and stayed out of jail for years on the varied trumped-up charges leveled against him, would not -- and now has not been able -- to escape long-term internment once he's arrested on a minor charge like "failure to make parole appearances" if he also had this other job of organizing mass unrest or worse.
In theory, Ovsyannikov could be facing 15 years under the new law, or at least a more serious charge punishable by several years for organizing a mass protest, although technically it was a solo picket which is allowed under the law in theory but not in practice (and a solo picket on national state TV may not fit their "time, place, and manner" legal criteria). Yet she was released from lock-up!
NV concludes that Ovsyannikova's protest (not her acknowledged pre-recorded statement) was live, although armies of armchair generals on Twitter who look at Putin's watch on TV to see if it matches with the actual time -- or even week -- in Moscow -- think it's fake. The war-mongerers are busy, and unlikely have the time and budget to mount an operation as complex as an entirely fictive protest and arrest and post-jail comment.
Still, there's the odd fact that she is out of jail now. Will we find that she has later walked out of Russia to Finland, as some have actually done, or made her way to another "post-Soviet republic" or Turkey or Israel as others are managing to do? If she is authentic, one hopes so for the sake of herself and her children.
The good news, as a Ukrainian blogger explains, if we take the faulty story at face value, is that it proves sanctions work. Not everyone affected by them is going to be sterling of character as they are motivated only by a loss of their privileges.
The interesting thing about this episode is that sanctions work (that's why the poster is in English btw); not that there's suddenly a saint, or that Russians are somehow miraculously redeemed. Sanctions work, elites started to crack, and this is a good news.
That's fine, we'll accept that to stop the bloodshed.
The hopes for those boosting this story are that it will work to create more protest, as indicated by Barbashin whom one might characterize as separate but establishment-oriented commentator. I've suffered all kinds of intimidation from him for pointing out that he once worked for a state-sponsored think tank which apparently no longer exists or whose web site was removed, headed by a former KGB official. No, the issue is NOT that his father worked for the "organs," as has been repeatedly and erroneously reported about him, enabling him to discredit all credits. My approach to his former media outlet strangely made to look like Index on Censorship is not to look at his parentage and his ticket stubs to strange conferences but just look at what is published. The line emerges. It can be soft on the Kremlin or more often hard on the anti-Putin contingent -- like anti-anti-Communism, the anti-anti-Putin project always appears liberal and independent and may actually be free of "Moscow gold."
Oops, he has now deleted his tweet even as I was trying to screenshot it, and has now redacted it and we can't be sure where it will be in an hour, hence these paste-ups:
The theory of "bounce back" (and not "blow back") is one that launched Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, of course, and the hard part is always to measure audience reaction and engagement, as the buzz word has it now, a task which the radios have refined over the years. Its placement of this story is indicative -- in old newspaper lay-out conception, it is not in the "right-lookers" upper right hand corner where you put the latest and most important war news, or anywhere on the "front page" upper half -- today, it's "below the fold," i.e. down on the lower part of the page with "trending visuals". It is under the story of a Fox News reporter killed in Ukraine -- and as much as you'd like to harden your heart against Fox News, which some might find responsible for aspects of the war in Ukraine, it's still the more important story of a person killed covering Russian warfare against Ukrainians and not making espresso in her designer kitchen now.
Will It Spread?
This story and the thesis that go with it -- that the children of oligarchs are going rogue on Ukraine -- doesn't have any play yet and I'm skeptical about it as much as the claims around Ovsyannikova. The daughter of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov; the daughter of Boris Yeltsin and wife of a Putin advisor Yumashev; Deripaska's daughter, another member of "The Family," have all made anti-war gestures. How far will this go or how long will it last? It's been more than two weeks and not much follow-up.
Russian protests are a story -- but they aren't the only story or indeed the main story when Ukrainians are fighting for their lives with incredible sacrifices against the Russian war monster.
Meduza, whose urbane American anti-anti-Putinist micro-blogger Kevin Rothrock has had a recent ostensible conversion, like Saul/Paul on the road to Kharkiv but who was only recently turning in snotty tweets like this one, has the more sophisticated take on all this, safely from Riga, where the former Lenta.ru editor and her loyal staff decamped years ago when she and some of them were dismissed over publishing a factual story about Yarosh.
As suspected, she was the protege of "powerful figures," but of the then-director of Kuban TV, which probably no one outside of Kuban ever watches or has heard of, as the actually powerful RT chief propagandist Marina said in a put-down disavowing she was Ovsyannikova's classmate, but admitting they once competed for a job position. And as suspected, and as is typical for Russian state media and any position of any influence, she got her job through her husband, Igor, whose mother already worked at TV1. So, Soviet and post-Soviet lesser royalty.
Meduza can perform the ultimate put-down of anything that seems like a "conspiracy theory" by getting a source who used to work at the station but resigned after his own personal disgust at his part in covering the invasion of Georgia (fortuitous, that). He described the building layout, the procedures, the lack of guards in numbing detail -- because many asked the question of why goons didn't instantly appear even live on screen to put a bag over her head and rush her to Lubyanka -- like they did with those computer programmers contracted to the FSB who may or may not have leaked information about Russia's manipulation of the US elections. There are no bag-holders. There's no guards at all. They are placed elsewhere at the entrance -- which is why she didn't even get out of the building of the TV tower at Ostankino. Understood.
As Meduza explains, people work in state media as loyalists, as naive newbies who think it's a resume builder even abroad, as lifers now fearful of leaving or they can't support their families. There is a lot of unhappiness there, and some of it might take the form of a Ukraine-related protest. As someone who has seen every kind of story from protesters from true to false, perhaps people resigning, especially in a dramatic stunt, want to build up their asylum case for when they flee abroad.
It's curious that no one seems to have come up with an actual job description and list of job duties for Ovsyannikova, except this strange source of Meduza who describes a sort of "city desk" called "City Services" collecting "stories from cities all over the world". About...what? Garbage disposal or street cafes or what? It is only admitted that she had sources of news about Ukraine -- but then any more or less savvy Internet user can do that with even just Russian social media and a VPN, some of which still work.
Meduza leaves to the very end the story of Ivan Urgant, the famous Vecherny Urgant (Evening Urgant) who is a kind of Jimmy Fallon of Russian TV -- very famous and rich and popular. Overnight, because he expressed outrage over the war in Ukraine, he was pulverized to dust, his show cancelled, his name erased from history. A figure like that had far more reach and was far more brave, really, than Ovsyannikova because he lost everything. He won't be able to make a career abroad, except possibly on the Brighton Beach comedy club circuit in New York City. His refusal to speak to Meduza may only be related to his need to get out of Russia first as he may not actually have the protection that Ovsyannikova has. Maxim Galkin, husband of famed singer Alla Pugacheva, is another such hugely popular figure who protested against the war on Instagram and was demolished over night, forced to leave for Turkey. Pugacheva is on "vacation" in Israel with their children. Every Russian knows them; now they are non-people because no one in the West did. No Russian ever heard of Ovsyannikova; now she is ensured safety and some kind of future because every Western media outlet embraced her.
The absolute best take on the Ovsyannikov was broadcast by Evgeniya Albats on YouTube, who interviewed Ovsyannikova at length and asked her many probing questions, as only someone immersed in Russian media realities can do, dredging up her Ukrainian past, her conflicts with the RT dragon lady and all the rest. You always have to ask with these stories: who were their parents? Were they Soviet nomenklatura? Dissident royalty? NKVD/KGB? Somebody helped Marina get a job in Ukraine (her father was Ukrainian), a job that she got in competition to Dragon Lady -- and yet continued to succeed, ending up in Moscow.
Wikipedia, oh that font of wisdom that has now utterly polluted chatGPT as I predicted, now says that Marina's actual job wasn't "the local news desk" but something much more suggesting a KGB education/training/background/involvement (in my view) because it dealt with sifting through Western news and pitching it to be useful to Russia -- a traditional disinformation/influence operation of "the organs", I could add. But maybe not.
***
So fast forward to 2024, more than two years later, how did this story turn out? As Reuters reported (using that awful word "fugitive" sounding like the person is an actual criminal, rather than political refugee) -- Ovsyannikova got an 8.5-year sentence in 2023.
As Reuters and others reported at the time, this sentence was not for her first TV picked, for which she was only fined. Rather:
But she later faced criminal prosecution for "spreading knowingly false information about the Russian Armed Forces" in connection with a July 2022 protest when she stood on a river embankment opposite the Kremlin and held up a poster calling President Vladimir Putin a murderer and his soldiers fascists.
But Marina had long before this fled with her daughter to an unknown location in Europe -- sometimes reported as Paris. And no, she was not poisoned as others have been.
Wikipedia recounts all her rather short-lived media jobs (it leaves out Italian TV for some reason), including Die Welt and her temporary departure from Russia (and leaving of her children to her now estranged husband), and her hounding out of Ukraine, where Ukrainians were really unimpressed with her "our two brotherly nations" stuff which she felt that "she herself embodied" no doubt in her parents. All of this is tiresome. The point is, while I'm personally skeptical that this isn't somebody's project, private or public, government or non-government, I'm also perfectly willing to say it's all true, and therefore you should be in despair, if you thought enabling picketers on state TV to get a soft landing at least on their first event will encourage others -- there haven't been any others and part of the problem is they are people like this.
I marvel at how some people are just tuning into the "Russia-as-rogue-state" understanding only NOW, two years into Russia's massively upscaled invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which of course followed its long war against Ukraine with many invasions, large and small, throughout 10 years since February 2014, starting with the seizure and forcible annexation of Crimea.
Many scholars began to concede this in 2014 -- after all, Russia had leased naval bases from Ukraine for decades, and its lucrative worldwide arms business out of Odessa had never been threatened by Ukraine, nor its presence in the Black Sea (now considerably diminished because of Russia's own actions, not Ukrainian policy or practice). Russia essentially owned and operated large parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts before the war via subsidies, Russian TV, and brute force as needed. It was only when Ukraine aspired to join the EU -- and not NATO, as some mischievously imply from wording in the EU accession agreement -- that Russian threatened and used massive force, that protesters amassed on Maidan Square, and then-president Yanukovych was forced to flee. (He fled, and was not "deposed" -- and fled to Russia. And then Russia invaded in earnest -- not in aiding one side in a "civil war" over "language rights" but in a naked land grab that is visible on the map.
IAN BREMMER
Ian Bremmer seems to have tuned into the "Russia is a rogue state" issue rather belatedly in 2022 although perhaps some assiduous troll can find a reference before that. My point is that now he is getting more rotation, although he began to get rinsed more and more as his predictions or punditry didn't add up, even in the New Republic where Andre Pagliarini pointed out that Bremmer's co-author in an enthusiastic piece about the new leader Putin -- Boris Nemtsov -- had been assassinated after becoming a vocal critic of VV. He went on to explain how wrong Bremmer was on a host of other issues like Brazil's president and noted that tone of authority on TV that makes people feel he is an oracle -- and which never seems to get checked before or after the talk shows.
Here on January 3, 2023, Bremmer makes a frank call of "rogue" -- but he also believes that Trump is the greatest risk factor to world security. It's hard to know where to start with a statement like that, even as a past and future Biden voter. Yes, things were terrible and will be terrible again under Trump -- but a big factor is his friendship and soft take with Russia. And Russia has invaded not just its own provinces but Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine, with mass crimes against humanity. Unless you're peddling some extremist theory about "the patriarchy" and "American imperialism" being responsible for mass deaths in a general sort of way like the weather, Russia is the real disturber of world peace on every front -- remember Russia aids Hamas and sells arms to Iran and puts North Korean laborers to work in its timber industry.
If you recall Bremmer in 2022 didn't believe Russia would invade Ukraine but long before that, in 1998 happily took Carter Page (injured but not innocent in the Steele Dossier) on his first voyage to Russia in 2011 to greet the new president Putin (he later disowned Page as "wackadoodle" downplaying his role, although he didn't last three months at Eurasia. The press has never pressed further to ask why he was ever hired in the first place). Bremmer consistently provokes with interviews like this where he imagines there was something the US "could have done" to prevent Putin from invading Ukraine that didn't involve massive threat of force.
STEELE DOSSIER
To take a detour here, I personally believed after writing along with Michael Weiss the longest and most thorough piece on the Steele Dossier anywhere, that Page is "injured but not innocent". The FBI was right to take a look at someone in the Trump campaign going to Russia and taking a cheery view of people and events there after everyone had gotten off the love train. But like so many stories related to Trumpkins and Russia, the smoking gun doesn't really materialize, although I personally agree "Michael Cohen was in Prague to meet the Russian" and "the server story" does have legs because sources don't keep their stories straight. (Note to self: save that article in case Coda goes under, like so many other brave publications these days.) That 8,000 word piece was actually cut down from much longer material.
Today, in headline after headline, under pressure and clouds of unknown from the GOP, plus the very real errors and distortions in the documents, the adjective "discredited" or even "fake" is used with regard to the Steele dossier. Even (especially?) VOA joins in this chorus deliberately missing the point. I don't think "falseness" is the way to understand this pastiche of materials, which we ourselves analyzed, showing how its internal workings weren't even consistent (speaking to the "pastiche" nature) and showing how there was a wrong or complete take on something like the "pee story" (it's not just that Trump is a clean freak; it's that the hotel rooms of such top figures as Trump are not controlled by the FSB, but by Putin's own Kremlin security force; hence the sourcing is dodgy).
It's a collection of materials that is partly false, partly true, partly misleading -- I suggested that we assign a value to every line so we could get a percentage factor, so that statements like "Putin wishes to influence Europe" ("the sky is blue") would get a 10, and a statement like "a hotel manager says Trump peed on prostitutes" would get a 0 (or you could work the evaluation in the opposite way -- and in the end you might get "47% true" or whatever you got. Along the way, the chronicles of which official in the PA is still there, or has been rewarded with jobs like speaker of parliament or official in charge of the Minsk accords or whatever the story, is rated as true because it is true. No journalist bothered to research in the weeds with available Russian language sources where Igor Sechin and Carter Page were -- the fact is, that while Sechin does intersect with Page in Moscow briefly, he is hardly likely to have met with the lowly Carter when he could meet with Rex Tillerson, the Exxon head, briefly Secretary of State, at the St. Petersburg Forum not long before the same time frame (and appears to have done so) and accomplish the same influence operation, you know? And so on down the line. The Steele Dossier as an artifact of US foreign news drama is decidedly yesterday's newspaper wrapping the fish; it seems like a very quaint and silly thing now by contrast with the whole war in Ukraine since then.
And the real story of the Steele Dossier which I should try to explain some day is that it represents a tracking of the all-important Russian Presidential Administration and its takeover of functions that the FSB either use to have or does but now faces competition, and that the Russians took a complicated computer network and people network set up to influence their own parliamentary elections out of the PA their way, and turned it around and translated it for use against Hillary in particular, but to distract and confuse and disinform people in the US elections in general. That's all. Most of the sources are Russian emigres, some still with Russian passports. Who else can still go to Russia, talk to any kind of official, and leave and come back again -- and yet not really have serious access but only talk to those who themselves might have?
Also at least one of the sources has even talked to me on Twitter; that is, a lower-level foreign-facing flak whose job consist of providing a mixture of facts (to retain credibility) and fakes to foreigners of varying levels of gullibility.
My point here with this detour is to explain that lots of stuff over the years gets discredited, discounted, written off, and then people sometimes realize they were too hasty with the box cutter, and too hasty in blessing or condemning this or that figure wholesale, and should realize it is all more nuanced. One humorous footnote is that Igor Danchenko was exonerated and released from custody, a story nobody noticed.
So..."rogue presidents" have a variety of friends, in and out of office, and friendlies who are not knowing collaborationists always, and there are exposes of their antics over the years, whether the now-maligned Steele Dossier or new reporting on the member of the Latvian parliament working for the GRU. It's a shame that these new exposes keep needing to be done -- along with examination with facts on the ground like people turning up dead in the West (that they fall out of windows in Russia is a given).
SHORT HISTORY OF CALLING RUSSIAN 'ROGUE'
This statement may have begun as an interrogative by the BBC in 2013, but Molotov's grandson, Putin loyalist, and Snowden greeter Vyacheslav Nikonov was there to tell you back then, now 14 years ago, that the real rogue was the US due to Guantanamo and Afghanistan. (Sound like the same formula again? "The real disrupter of world peace is Donald Trump.")
Atlantic Council's Andrew Kornbluth tried to argue it was a "troll state" not a "rogue" state. That's cute, but trolls are mainly a nuisance on Twitter, where Russian disinformation activists run rampant -- that's not the same thing as massacring civilians in Bucha as a rogue state.
Time published Conservative UK parliament member Tom Tugendhat who called Russia "a rogue state" after the attempt to kill Russian defector Skripal and his daughter, but that doesn't count because he's right-wing, correct?
The Obama Administration apparently only used the term "rogue" to refer to Russia once -- and this thinky piece tells you the criteria for the "rogues" -- but note that two out of the list -- Iran and Syria -- have long been armed by Russian and provided political cover. And that's why I wish the "rogue police" would look at not only the individual leader they to whom they wish to apply this designation, but the other world leaders they help. Nutty lefties on Twitter put up silly pictures of NATO bases saying "Russia, move your country away" but that disguises where Russia's bases are within its vastness, ready to deploy to Europe, and where they are throughout the rest of the world. Amnesty was once honest in admitting that Russia was the world's largest seller of armaments to rogue states and dictators massively violating human rights -- not America -- but now it puts out tables showing that the US is the largest arms dealer, obfuscating the fact that arms sales to...Canada or Australia or even Saudi Arabia...are very different than arms sales to Iran and Syria.
Why is this always so hard?
You could argue that by the second Chechen war, Russia was a rogue state although back in the 1990s, it was Chechnya that was called the "rogue". By 2007, when Russia invaded Georgia directly after the NATO summit in Germany where votes failed to be gathered to include Georgia in a process to join the EU. It's hard to pretend to justify as a security or anti-terrorism measure.
RUSSIA IS A TERRORIST STATE
In fact, if you really want to talk turkey here (BTW, Russia built a nuclear power station for Turkey and sells arms to its frenemy, although suspends these activities when Turkey shoots down a Russian plane near its border), the Russian state has always been rogue since 1917. It is and was a terrorist state, not under the rule of law, and not even under "rule-by-law" as the German term Rechtsstaat has it -- different but still better than rogue-ness. The Bolsheviks (and the Social Democrats and others before them) ran terrorist conspiracies and used bombing of government, business and residential buildings to "make a point", although with assassinating people in large numbers. Lenin's terror and then Stalin's terror are all mass crimes against humanity of a rogue state. As some dissident commentators have pointed out over the years, Russia never properly formed an open state; it was always a conspiracy of men who had personally used or directed terrorism and used cover names and body doubles.
When you get to Yeltsin and Gorbachev, the crimes in Chechnya are massive; the crimes of Lenin and Stalin were never tried. There was never a Soviet Nuremburg trial. Russia was included in world security structures -- the UN, the OSCE (where the thinking was that in exchange for recognition of post-war borders, the Soviets could be coddled into recognizing human rights), many other institutions and agencies where really, they never had any business being in, ever (Interpol).
OLD ANECDOTES ABOUT EURASIA GROUP, OSCE, STATE
A word about all this from my own life, as I am beginning to realize that I will never get my memoirs written unless I use blog posts to start putting together things as I did with my Snowden book in 2013.
The Eurasia Group's initial embryonic form years ago in New York City was mainly in the form of luncheons with high officials from different countries, sometimes even leaders, often during the UN General Assembly, when many of them were here. They were "Chatham House rules" (or off-the-record) affairs and invitations could be hard to come by. In their earliest form, some of the colleagues of the Eurasia Group would insist on having human rights organizations send representatives to ask questions of some of these rogue world leaders, or they would at least bring in academics with a little more critical take on them. I'm not sure how big the staff or how big the Eurasia client list was back in the late 1990s but surely it was smaller than it is today or has been in the 30 years since. My recollection is that the Eurasia Group consulting firm founded in 1998 was preceded by the Eurasia Group policy luncheons by some years, so no double some people will begin to complain they were different things, but they involved the same people. The crew of those willing to follow what was happening in Kyrgyzstan back then was very small -- "Eurasia" generally meant "Central Asia, and Russia, and how it affects it." But the largest Eurasia -- which means whatever it means, ask around, you get a host of answers on that question -- meant Belarus as well.
Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the dictator of Belarus, came to power in 1997, at first with enthusiasm by some who thought he would clean up corruption. Unlike Russia at that time, Belarus had a robust, professional opposition in parliament, government, and with its own radio stations -- Belarus, despite all its trials and tribulations over the centuries, still is closer to Europe. In 1999 I believe, Lukashenka came to the General Assembly; by that time, critical figures like even Lukashenka's own Interior Minister and others in parliament, TV, and business, had begun to disappear as if in Central America, not Central Europe, never to be found. So it was felt Bat'ka should take some questioning on that subject. But in discussing this with a State Department official at the Belarus desk at the time, I found that State preferred groups not to meet with Lukashenka at all so as not to give him recognition. I told them about the Eurasia Group lunch which technically wasn't outside the mile limit from the UN that State was going to put on Luka. Well, State can inform you of their policy, but private groups can do what they wish within the law.
When Bremmer found out about my conversation through colleagues, he called me to yell at me at length and threaten me with loss of my job by getting my boss (who had invited me to the meeting) and others to turn on me. He was terrified at the time that with this news of his luncheon's existence reaching State (like that would remain a secret even under Chatham House rules with 40 people at a luncheon with a head of state?!), he would lose his generous State Department grants which he had at the time for his studies.
I shrugged at this because I did not fear him and did not feel it was my job to worry about his grants with State, which I was certain would not be discontinued over this and were not. That's not how the world works. There are officials within State and NSA and other agencies who may be more critical of these countries than their bosses or the current president would like to be, and sometimes they find themselves reassigned to Fiji, and during certain periods of history they suddenly get a hearing or a promotion but the bulk of the policy for 30 years has been Realpolitik and International Realism. This article in Mosaic , discussing the "peace processers" in the Middle East, provides background for the types we might call "the security arrangers" in Europe. These are certain people in and out of State, in its revolving door or proximity, who endlessly invoke "security arrangements" with Russia -- as if Russia could arrange any security now out of a paper bag, given its outrageous mauling of Ukraine.
As these six former ambassadors now loudly proclaim, the time for talking about "security arrangements" with Putin is long past the sell-by date. That's not just because Russia is a rogue state; it's a terrorist state; it's a state with a leader, Vladimir Putin, for him arrest warrants have been issued on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide notably on the matter of abducting large numbers of children into Russia from Ukraine because their parents were killed or lost or separated from them -- a warrant that became possible because Russia's own officials took pride in this massive abduction and spoke of it in glowing terms.
I wish these six former ambassadors/State Department officials had said these sorts of things while in office in the last 30 years -- the world would be a better place. But that's not how the world works.
I will mention my meetings with five of them over the years. The 6th, Jovanovich, I never met; she was not in her job long in Kyiv before she was targeted with an outrageous smear campaign run by Trump which ultimately led to her resignation (though she was not found to do anything wrong) -- a dreadful loss for the Foreign Service in the US and not the only one triggered by Trump.
I recall taking around to meetings in Washington, DC Andrei Sannikov, former deputy minister of foreign affairs in Belarus who resigned when Luka came to power, and who later had a brief life as a opposition presidential candidate before he was jailed for about two years. Back in the 1990s, he would visit Pifer and Pascual (then at NSA) to provide information about the rapidly deteriorating situation in Belarus and plead the cause for recognition of the independent sector and US sanctions. The US was uneven on this score, at one point developing a curious carrot-and-stick approach that seemed all carrot and never any stick -- although at a certain point, the US and numerous other foreign embassies were simply kicked out of Minsk.
I recall dealing with Taylor during his time at the embassy in Kazakhstan, particularly when a US citizen in a media assistance program was murdered (and that followed the severe beating of another US government official involved in democracy aid and these cases were played down to maintain good relations -- Chevron is in Kazakhstan). And on other countries and cases later.
Meetings with Herbst took place over the years in various groups related to Uzbekistan and Ukraine, including the Atlantic Council.
All these officials were conscientious, informed, filled with good will, some of the "Guardians" as I call such people in these often large and faceless bureaucracies like State who do the right thing at crunch time, often as they are shredding papers and turning off the lights and fleeing a mob outside the door in a country under civil war -- like an official who took the time among his last urgent chores to fax out the visa confirmation for a Tajik journalist who might have been murdered along with dozens of others in that civil war.
But they all had constraints in their jobs which related to the over all Borg or Blob or whatever you want to call the foreign policy establishment and actual foreign policy arm of the US government.
BUYING UP ALL THE GASOLINE IN INGUSHETIA
I'm also recalling what is called a "pull-aside" with the then-ambassador to OSCE -- that's when a busy aide won't give you an actual appointment for a meeting, but enable you to ask a few questions for 10 minutes in the hallway. I said I had an urgent report from Sergei Kovalev, then ombudsman for human rights in Yeltsin's government warning of the impending second invasion of Chechnya which had begun with the Chechen rebels attack on Dagestan in August 1999. My pull-aside then turned into a meeting sitting in his office in the dark -- he had turned off his lights and was about to go to lunch. I gave him the translated field reports with information such as all the gasoline disappearing in Ingushetia -- the Russian army was buying it up. Families of certain officials fleeing the area -- they got a tip-off. Stuff. Nonsense. He took it seriously. But little could be done by then by the US, apparently.
Make of it what you will but the fancy cars with Moscow license plates, the Russian equivalents of jeeps appearing en masse in a place like Ingushetia is usually the first sign of trouble -- as it was with the fake protest in parliament in Crimea. "Here's how protesters go out to demonstrations these days," said one Crimea-based photographer on Facebook who I knew from family -- they were cars with Moscow plates circulating around before the parliament was taken over. That fellow found himself arrested and it was a miracle that his camera -- his livelihood at a local news outlet -- was not broken merely because the regime goons got too busy with a lot of cases. When he was let go, he began posting pictures of his cats.
Everything is terrible. "That animal eye is just what you say". And "The world is ugly and the people are sad."I'm a footnote in history at best and my work has been futile and so has yours. As for Thomas Graham, excoriated by the six ambos in the Bulkwark, I know personally that even he has done good privately although publicly I view him as wrong about everything for most of his career at the Kissinger Associates. It doesn't matter now; it's larger than we are, and we let it get that way, to the point where assigning blame now would take away too much effort from emergency response and help to Ukraine rather than "peace processing" and "security arranging."
Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia is, and has been a rogue state even if you don't believe it always was, or believe this only recently. I think we can all agree on this now, pretty much
For reasons I don't understand and don't have time to research (jealousy? an actual principled stand against antisemitism? Really, Mark?!) Facebook won't let you publish links to Twitter any more.
This public witness marks the weekend of "Day of Rembrance of Political Prisoners," a tradition actually begun on October 30, 1974 by Kronid Lubarsky, astronomer and other political prisoners in the Soviet-era labour camps, who made a list of demands, including commemoration of the day.
The date was the day of Kronid''s sentencing and not specifically because it is close to Western Christianity's Halloween (October 31), All Saints' Day (November 1) or All Souls' Day (as I once naively thought myself). Russian Orthodoxy does not celebrate All Souls' Day; All Saints' Day is at a different time of year. Perhaps that is understandable given that Orthodoxy stresses the continual presence of both the living and the dead in the Body of Christ, but I'm not an expert. Even so, the "Festival of the Dead" following the end of the harvest is celebrated in many world cultures.
In Russia, the grim reaper scythes through those active enough to protest the regime, stand up for others, or simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Remember when the woman arrested gave her occupation as traktorist (tractor driver) in Russian, and some official thought she said Trotskist or "Trotskyite".
Reuters and other major news outlets have excerpted the interview published on Telegram and other Russian media sources today, June 26, 2023, with Vladislav Surkov, former presidential advisor:
Chesnakov: How do you see the reasons and possible consequences of Prigozhin's rebellion?
Surkov: It's fashionable now in Russia to dig around in history. So here's some history for you: in 1980 in Leningrad [St. Petersburg], a woman was walking along the street. An ordinary woman. Three gopniks [low-class street thugs] jumped her. One of them came at her from behind, grabbed her by the neck and began to strangle her. He squeezed her neck until she fainted. Then the gopniks tore off her earings and -- note this! -- her boots. These beasts were then arrested and tried. The one who grabbed the woman from behind and strangled her was named Yevgeny Prigozhin. That's all you need to know about Prigozhin. Nothing more. Nothing else matters.
Fortunately, rhetorical questions do not presuppose answers.
Chesnakov: What is needed to normalize the situation?
Surkov: Lots of things. But the main thing is to secure undivided authority. And for that, we have to think seriously -- why do we need private military companies, really?
As is known, I believe Russian democracy to be sovereign. The main feature of this approach is that you cannot blindly copy foreign institutions. Some things must be borrowed; others, not. It is critically important to consider the special features of national culture and psychology in constructing a political system.
What is a private military company (PMC)? It is a direct borrowing from Western practice, or rather, from American practice. And this will be more western than any West will be. Now, talk has sprung up again about a law on PMCs [they are still not legalized in Russia--trans.]. But should an institution be legitimized, which in Russian real terms is essentially anti-Constitutional in nature? They'll pass the law, and a string of enthusiasts will be drawn to high office. And they'll persuade people to permit them to create a private army. And many will be persuaded.
How can a military detachment be private, in our understanding? This does not correspond at all to Russian political, management, and military culture. You can't have your own private nuclear station, for example, in Russia. But you can have your own private assault division? Why? "Private armies" emerged in Russia only during the Time of Troubles and the Civil War. If a law on PMCs is passed, no matter how good it is and well conceived, no matter how precisely it is drafted, that the PMCs are subordinate to army command, and are part of the army and so on, such a law will create a dangerous prospect of turning our country in the future into some sort of Eurasian "tribal zone".
We don't need that. We have a contract system in our Armed Forces. You can make it more detailed, you can make it more flexible if needed, but don't play around with the PMCs any more.
After all, PMCs were created to take part in proxy wars. Why do we need them today, when we are openly taking part in the battle for Ukraine? This isn't a proxy war; this is a special military operation. The army must be strengthened not only with armaments, but with unity of leadership.
Do you remember why the strategic industrial branches of the USSR collapsed? They were destroyed by the law on cooperatives. At each state enterprise, numerous private cooperatives sprang up. Profit then accrued to the cooperatives which was controlled and eaten up by the state enterprise management. But the expenditures and losses were bucked to the state. The result was bankruptcy, and the collapse of machine-building and extractive industries. How many years and how much cash was needed to restore them!
The PMC is, after all, a cooperative attached to the army! The army has to absorb all the "losses" -- both material and reputational. But the PMC gets the cash and the glory. Yes, there are many heroes among the PMC fighters. But are there really less of them among the "ordinary" paratroopers, infantry, tank drivers, and gunners?! If this is not stopped, the result will be devastating.
Chesnakov: Progozhin made the statement that the special military operation is profitable only for oligarchs?
Surkov: Right. Oligarchs like him. What is an oligarch, from the perspective of political science? It's a businessman who makes money from state purchasing orders (for example, delivering food and kamikaze soldiers for the Ministry of Defense, as Prigozhin does [a reference to Prigozhin's rounding up of prisoners and raw recruits and sending them into battle where they are killed in large numbers--trans]); who has media resources (as he has); corrupt ties with government agencies (as he has); and political ambitions (as he has). Prigozhin is an oligarch. If Berezovsky had been given a tank, he would have turned out like Prigozhin. It's profitable for him.
But the battle for Ukraine began and will end not for the sake of profit. But for the sake of victory.
So this scandal riling all the YouTube Russian talk shows is now in the English-language media here and here.
Dozhd' - TV Rain -- which used to broadcast out of a studio, then an apartment, then went on YouTube and emigrated to Riga like Moscow Times - has been informed by Latvia that it has lost its broadcast license as a "threat to national security" over its broadcasting policies exhibited in various newscasts not only referring to Crimea as "part of Russia," but also discussing how Russian draftees can be helped in their miserable position.
War is hell. Ukrainian women join the armed forces, risk death, and spend countless months at the expense of their health helping those on the front line. They demonstrated in Maidan and got themselves killed for the sake of eliminating (not entirely) Russia's heavy hand. If the wives and mothers of the newly-mobilized (or the long-time conscientious) can't bestir themselves to really demonstrate like it counts, and risk jail and death the way the Ukrainian people have throughout history and now, then I don't see why we have to be overly concerned with providing first-aid kits and blankets to Russian soldiers to help them fight better.
The ICRC can perform that function, that neutral, fine, prejudice-free organization called by the international justice system to do this awful good deed, taught by the world's greatest religions, notably Islam and Judaism -- even if the Red Crescent and the Mogen David were a little late in coming to the ICRC's symbolic arsenal. Oh, the ICRC can't get into some areas because their own people are killed? Well, if they don't want to publicize who is responsible for that, as they publicize these things about Israel/Palestine, then, I guess we'll have to wait for...OSCE. Oh, but Russia defunded the mission there and they were forced to leave. Maybe the ROC, that church-without-a-basement could step up?
"If you want Russia to be better after all this you have to do this," isn't an argument that works on me any more, sorry. I'll dissect that point in my next post, "Is Russian Civil Society Worth Saving?" to retail the answers I've received from various colleagues: "Yes, of course, because..." or "There isn't any Russian civil society" to "But we didn't win the war yet, so we can't have a Marshal Plan."
So the fullest version of the TV Rain saga du jour is here and predictable takes from herehere and here. Let me suggest that this affair still awaits its deepest investigative and impartial journalism. And as always with these sorts of scandals, those with a particle "Moscow Bubble" bien-pensant view imagine that anyone who differs is not as smart, not as intellectual, and not as nuanced as they are and is a "neo-con" or and unthinking booster of "the Kyiv regime" etc. So often these controversies are discussed -- especially on Twitter and other social media -- as popularity contests with everyone looking fearfully over their shoulder so as not to be taken of the policy breakfast list.
I had hoped that as we all actually look at the war on the ground -- we all do that, right? -- we would be getting past that sort of snotty Muscovite solipsism even though said thinkers "aren't in Moscow any more." But no.
What will it take to make Russia a viable country, even a democracy, that ceases to be a threat to its neighbours and even itself?
Well, the concept of "itself" will have to change, for one. I think some of us believe, given our long study of Russia and our personal sojourns among its people that "Russia" will have to lose some of its 89 "subjects" just like "the Soviet Union" had to lose everything, including the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic.
And even the Russian opposition, such as it is, will have to change.
Change is hard, but it does start with something like this, sadly:
Otherwise the West is helping a Russian exiled opposition which could turn out like Lenin's, which may be worse for the country. You may differ on your take on this.
And yeah, I totally get it about this and whatever other "OSINT" and "HUMINT" we're going to dredge up on this matter that will show "both are worse," like they say in Odesa. I will pre-emptively declare any and all examples of perfidy uncovered as "besides the point" in advance.
Because: Russians.
But if you think Dozhd's crime was merely about the misstatement of one journalist, which might be fixed with other's commentary, or the wrong map, which Google is guilty of, too, for which Dozhd was fined, then you haven't been paying attention since, oh, 2014, when Tikhon Dzyadko, despite (because of?) his last name, welcomed Crimea to Russia on Twitter.
Zinovy Zinik called this larger, long-term problem correctly (see below). Yes, there are some of us who remember the context of No Context Russia -- but let's say it's not a tweet that aged well.
Should the governments of countries get to dictate what the ideological platforms should be of emigres who flee persecution on their territory?
Oh, I don't know, maybe countries that have been invaded and occupied for 50+ years by the country from which those emigres fled get to do that, you know? Especially when the issue at hand concerns currently- but temporarily-occupied regions of a neighbouring country, Ukraine.
Should we avoid occasions where we add to the self-pity of very-recent mobikis and their media, much less long-suffering opposition and emigre groups?
Oh, I don't know. Maybe they need to learn like the rest of. Many bars in the US used to have signs on the door: NO IRISH.
Am I surprised that I have parted company on this topic with the thinking of Kevin Rothrock, Alexey Kovalev and others at Meduza who used to relentlessly harass and troll and threaten us at The Interpreter? Or someone like Anton Barbashin who tried to get me fired from my job for my apt and just criticism of his now-forgotten magazine? Before they got religion after Feb. 24, seemingly? No.
Will I be sorry that my views on this matter are different from some of my dearest Russian friends and colleagues? Sure. I'm sure they'll be able to handle differences of opinion and not demand any "honour of uniform", right?
Does an incident of this nature lead to loss of refugee status? Well, then, in keeping with various UN treaties on the treatment of refugees barring nonrefoulement, if Latvia can't comply, the US should step up here as we are the wealthier country with more distance between us and Russia, and more diversity among our population and immigrants, right? The US isn't supplying ANY visas to ANY Russians from Russia, and it may want to re-think that policy and figure out how to deploy it better at other capitals if its thinking can't stretch that far.
I doubt funding TV Rain from our shores will cost any more damage to national security than New York City funding the broadcasting of RTV, where I once worked as a lowly translator and caption editor, right? That franchise was owned by a Polish company, BTW, out of New Jersey, I think, and NYC ended up letting it go, I suppose because it didn't have enough of an audience. There are emigre Russian TV stations in New York with more varied and critical news than RT.
Just one request: put them in Voice of America. Not RFE/RL.
Update: I didn't have to wait more than five minutes for someone who is very decent and conscientious, Yevgeniya Albats, to step up and explain NO CONTEXT RUSSIA here -- that Tikhon in fact was saying this "ironically" about a Crimea that had seemingly embraced Russian occupation, but was now experiencing what "Russia Mainland" always experienced when a demonstration was broken up by police.
You can't see the YouTube link on the tweet, but if you click on it, yeah, that's what it was about (and its "non-availability" now doesn't necessarily mean anything about TV Rain hiding something; lots of videos Russia doesn't like get removed under pressure from Russia on YouTube, often with fake "copyright violation" abuse reports.)
Let me suggest that ironical tweets can be written differently: "Be careful what you wished for, Crimea." Or "We warned you, Crimea." If we even take "Crimea" as a "whole" of anything except part of Ukrainian territory. How about: "The will of the Crimean people has really not been taken into consideration, especially given the large population of Crimean Tatars."
Instead, with the superb irony of the Moscow-insulated-insider, he said "Welcome to Russia." We're always supposed to understand that nuances and sarcasm is almost as good as fighting a war until you win. But the Ukrainian people show daily that it is not.
I recall this because context I covered the war in Ukraine for 8 years, unlike many people tuning in now. Tikhon could have a) deleted the tweet; b) added clarification then or now. Did he? I may have missed it. If he did, great, but the fact that it could be bandied about now
The Russian opposition has to change. It has to change. It has to change.
Another Update: Here's Tikhon's "apology tour". Instructive to read the responses of not only Ukrainians, but Russians, who are less than impressed. If we're supposed to be chastised for "not fact checking" (I actually remember this context back in the day), it's not persuasive because he only digs himself in deeper. Yes, he's referring ironically to a territory of Ukraine which he perceives as "wanting to join Russia" so he calls it as a single whole, "Crimea" -- although even if the technical majority of Sovietized Russian-speakers on that peninsula might have voted for annexation if they were in a free and fair and OSCE-endorsed referendum -- there's the significant population of Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, who are the indigenous people of Crimea, and others, who would have voted "no" -- and we'll never know, as there wasn't a free referendum with the free press and independent judiciary you need for this.
Tikhon Viktorich really gets his ass handed to him in the discussion below "explanatory" tweet, and not only from Ukrainians, and that's a good thing, even if some of them are Kremlin trolls.
I only have some tidbits to add to reflect on this latest drama.
o There hasn't been an assassination related to the war in Ukraine since Boris Nemtsov in 2015, on the eve of a march against both the war in Ukraine and the economic crisis (I think). Of course a lot happens outside Moscow and we don't know everything that happens. Yevgeny Kham, the Buryat editor who apparently died of his wounds in 2017 after a severe beating in 2015, who had run critical coverage of the war, is said to have been attacked for other stories. Still, it's not a common occurrence at all. Arrests, yes. Assassinations, no - although I can't help thinking I must be missing something obvious. So someone felt "it's time" in whatever department or faction.
o Goble reported that Sasha Verkhovsky recently came out with a report saying nationalist violence is less than it has been because the regime has suppressed it. This was before Dugina's car bombing but it is a very important context, read all the way through and Sasha's full report as well.
So...this suggests that it's not the nationalists themselves targeting each other (because they are suppressed) and maybe bolsters the idea that the FSB or GRU did a false flag but then, we've all been over this "Putin's brain" stuff -- he's not, and Putin, as chair of the board of Moscow State University, ordered him fired from his position there after he began calling for the killing of Ukrainians openly on social media back in 2014-2015, posting photos of himself with a bazooka;
That is, you'd have to figure out why the FSB/GRU would do a false flag when they don't need to as it's not like anti-war resistance is a factor in Russia, or that there is some strong nationalist movement that thinks Russia looks bad by prosecuting this war...or something.
o Russia was just rocked by another crisis involving a prominent regime supporter, Senator Isakov, and his daughter, who openly opposed the war, and maybe "someone" felt there needed to be "balance" to put the focus on the nationalists as victims again, not Ukrainians. Maybe there is just free-lancing craziness.
o Ponomarev has been flogging the need for an armed insurrection in Russia on talk shows and social media recently and now the announcement of the National Republic Army (NRA) (what an acronym!) came simultaneously with the assassination of Dugina. The NRA is something he thinks needs to come into being and maybe has, but I don't know -- some group or groups are blowing up all those recruiting stations and military targets in Russia and it's not likely Ukraine -- and maybe has nothing to do with Ponomarev or his circle. In 2017, he was meeting with another Russian MP, Denis Voronenkov, who had also fled Ukraine, when Voronekov was assassinated. Ponomaryev fled first to the US, then later to Ukraine, after turning in the sole vote against the annexation of Crimea as then a member of the State Duma. He told Meduza the NRA takes responsibility for the assassination of Dugina and says it is in retaliation for her call to murder Azov battalion members. He is sketchy on the details and himself says he can't confirm it, and I'm skeptical.
o Ukrainians wouldn't target a second-tier nationalist/extremist now, would they? Unless opportunity/gaps in security enabled them? A lot of Russian nationalists have been killed fighting in Ukraine. But why has there been nothing like this in 8 and a half years in Russia? The Ukrainian government denies involvement and says, "We don't work like this."
o Someone should compare and contrast the car bombs used to assassinate those 8 or so "DNR angels" - the the top Donesk People's Republic leaders and fighters.
o They need to target a nationalist either for cause or in a false flag operation? But...who's left? COVID took Zhirinovsky; Yegor Prosvirnin, the young fascist with hipster followers, was defenestrated possibly at his own initiative; Strelkov/Girkin thrives but is critical of the war's inefficiencies and visible only on YouTube; so maybe there isn't a good/pure target these days? I just don't know. Certainly Dugin's vocal supporters blamed Ukraine at the funeral and the state media is doing so and a Fanya Kaplan like figure, a Ukrainian who went to Estonia, has already been fingered.
I agree with Victor Davidoff (cited by Cathy) that the "Fanya Kaplan" kind of episode (attempted to assassinate Lenin) can usher in another wave of terror. Except...we already have terror, and plenty of it, in Ukraine obviously and it has been in Russia all this time.
And why a figure who is *not* Putin's brain, why not someone actually in the regime or a more establishment, accepted figure? Then it's like Kirov or Lenin -- Dugin is not that kind of figure. So why not Surkov (who seems irrelevant now but still, it would have to be a figure without heavy government security).
o The "ritual murder" stuff is cried by ordinary people on social media as well as Kremlin propagandists every time an opposition figure is murdered so it's not surprising to see it now about the nationalists, but whatever Dugin's wacky writings on this subject, I hardly think he would go to this extreme with his own daughter when he doesn't need to. I think he seems genuinely upset. Someone was able to frame his terribly distraught face as he clutched his hands to his head as the bomb went off -- that suggests planning (like those 3 camera angles at the Odessa trade union building fire). He was weeping and shaking as he spoke at the funeral. But who knows?
o We see so many horrible, horrible things done in Ukraine for no other reason than escalating the horror and intimidation, and maybe that's all that is operating here. Opportunism. Overkill. Somebody wishing to please Putin ostensibly.
o When was the last time a woman was able to *safely* lead a political group of any kind in Russia besides Sobchak, who is basically in tune with the regime now despite her Telegram channel? There's that. Seems more likely Dugin himself was targeted -- but then precisely because of both vicious and casual misogyny, Dugina could have been targeted; there is this odd story about a relationship to Le Pen.
I agree that while you can certainly find many aspects of Dugina's own career to be despicable, not to mention her murderous father's campaigns, it's wrong to take glee in their misfortune. A trial in an international tribunal or independent and just court in Russia, should it ever come into being, would be highly preferable for the sake of the society's future. And for practical reasons, people never are converted by torture and murder and only become more radicalized.
The operative point is that facial recognition technology was used to make the detention of dozens of Russians. Kazantseva was not anywhere near a demonstration and was on her way home, although as she notes, she had been detained in the past.
Translation
A flood of insane sensations have been spreading through the news, taking on distortions along the way!
I was detained in the metro, after being recognized by the cameras; the metro police themselves couldn't explain the reason; then the police at the station explained that it was because I had gone into the metro on Russia Day, and accordingly, the point of the detention was so that I didn't go to the center of Moscow and didn't stage any anti-war protest. Since I was headed in a direction away from the center, and not the opposite, and it was already evening, I was held for a relatively short time (I was detained at 19:00 and was already released at 21:30). I was treated politely and with some embarrassment; I was released without a record of a misdemeanor, since none had taken place, but I did have to write an explanatory note.
Here is the explanatory note:
"On 12.06.22 at approximately 19:00 I was at the Fili Metro Station, waiting for the train, so as to go home, but police officers came up to me and asked me to follow them to the office. After a little while, police officers came and took me to the Filyovsky Park Police Precinct in Moscow. The reasons for being taken to the precinct are not known to me. I had not committed any illegal actions. I would also like to add that I am pregnant and the detention caused me stress, which is harmful for the baby, according to modern data in the science of neurobiology, a subject in which I am an expert with a degree. In addition I would like to explain that I was not headed in the direction of the center of Moscow. A prophylactic conversation was conducted with me about how people who have administrative detentions in their pasts ought not to go in the metro on Russia Day. This is a true copy of my statement."
Today Nikolai and I celebrate the 10th anniversary of our meeting.
This is how we spent our romantic evening: Nikolai snapped a photo of how the police escorted me to the toilet.
The thing is, today is Russia Day, and as it was explained to me by the keepers of the peace at the precinct, on this day, if someone is undesirable, they must not go in the metro. Such a person is preventatively detained so that they do not express their civic position.
Honestly, I had not in fact planned that today, but now that it has come to this, I will state that the war with Ukraine is criminal, and destructive even for Russia as well, and should be immediately halted.
There were 9,323 likes on this post, and many messages of encouragement, but also some nasty swipes at her personal life -- an example of what women who take public positions endure online, particularly in Russia.
READ the closing statement of Alla Gutnikova, one of the editors of the Moscow student journal DOXA, who are all facing prison sentences for "inciting minors to take part in illegal opposition protests”. But the speech is about so much more. (The translation was adapted from that of Michelle Panchuk.) Listen to Alla’s original here: https://doxajournal.ru/lastword-alla
“I am not going to speak of the case, the search, the interrogations, the volumes, the trials. That is boring and pointless. These days I attend the school of fatigue and frustration. But before my arrest, I had time to enroll in the school of learning how to speak about truly important things.
I would like to talk about philosophy and literature. About Benjamin, Derrida, Kafka, Arendt, Sontag, Barthes, Foucault, Agamben, about Audre Lorde and bell hooks. About Timofeeva, Tlostanova and Rachmaninova.
I would like to speak about poetry, about how to read contemporary poetry. About Gronas, Dashevsky and Borodin.
But now is not the time nor the place. I will hide my small tender words on the tip of my tongue, in the back of my throat, between my stomach and my heart. I will say just a little.
I often feel like a little fish, a birdling, a schoolgirl, a baby. But recently, I discovered with surprise that Brodsky, too, was put on trial at 23. And, since I have also been counted among the human race, I will say this:
n the Kabbala there is the concept of tikkun olam - repairing the world. I see that the world is imperfect. I believe, as wrote Yehuda Amichai, that the world was created beautiful for goodness and for peace, like a bench in a courtyard (in a courtyard, not a court!). I believe that the world was created for tenderness, hope, love, solidarity, passion, joy.
But the world is atrociously, unbearably full of violence. And I don’t want violence. In any form. No teacher’s hands in schoolgirls’ underwear, no drunken father’s fists on the bodies of wives and children. If I decided to list all the violence around us, a day wouldn’t be enough, nor a week, nor a year. My eyes are wide open. I see violence, and I don’t want violence. The more violence there is, the stronger I don’t want it. And more than anything, I don’t want the biggest and the most frightening violence.
I really love reading. I will now speak with the voices of others.
At school, in history class, I learned the phrases “You crucify freedom, but the soul of man knows no bounds” and “For your, and for our, freedom”.
In high school, I read “Requiem” by Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova, “The Steep Path” by Evgeniya Solomonovna Ginzburg, “The Closed Theater” by Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava, “The Children of Arbat” by Anatoliy Naumovich Rybakov. Of Okudzhava’s poems I loved most of all:
Conscience, honor and dignity, There’s our spiritual army.
\
Hold out your palm to it, For this, one fears no fire. Its face is lofty and wonderful. Dedicate to it your short century. Maybe, you will never be victorious, But you'll die as a human.
At MGIMO [Moscow State Institute of International Relations] I learned French and memorized a line from Édith Piaf: “Ça ne pouvait pas durer toujours” [“It could not last forever”]. And from Marc Robine: “Ça ne peut pas durer comme ça” [“It cannot go on like this”].
At nineteen, I traveled to Majdanek and Treblinka and learned to say “never again” in seven languages: never again, jamais plus, nie wieder, קיינמאל מער, nigdy więcej, לא עוד.
I studied Jewish sages and fell in love with two proverbs. Rabbi Hillel said: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” And Rabbi Nachman said: “The whole world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is to have no fear at all.”
Later, I enrolled at the School of Cultural Studies and learned several more important lessons. First of all, words have meaning. Second, we must call things by their names. And finally, sapere aude, have the courage to use your own mind.
It’s ridiculous that our case has to do with schoolchildren. I taught children the humanities in English, worked as a nanny and dreamed of going with the program “Teacher for Russia” to a small town for two years to sow intelligent, kind, eternal seeds. But Russia - in the words of the state prosecuting attorney, Prosecutor Tryakin - believes that I involved underage children in life-threatening actions. If I ever have children (and I will, because I remember the greatest commandment), I will hang a picture of the Judaean governor Pontius Pilate on their wall, so they grow up in cleanliness. The governor Pontius Pilate standing and washing his hands - such will be the portrait. Yes, if thinking and feeling is now life-threatening, I don’t know what to say about the charges. I wash my hands.
And now is the moment of truth. The hour of transparency.
My friends and I don’t know what to do with ourselves from the horror and the pain, but when I descend into the metro, I don’t see tear-stained faces. I don’t see tear-stained faces.
Not a single of my favorite books - for children or adults - taught indifference, apathy, cowardice. Nowhere have I been taught the words:
we are small people i am a simple person it’s not so black and white you can’t believe anyone i am not interested in all that i am far from politics it’s none of my business nothing depends on me competent authorities will figure it out what could i have done alone
No, I know and love very different words.
John Donne says through Hemingway:
No man is an island, all by himself. Every person is part of the Mainland, part of Land; and if a wave sweeps away a coastal cliff into the sea, Europe will become smaller. And likewise if it washes away the edge of the cape or destroys your castle or your friends. The death of every person diminishes me as well, for I am one with all of humanity. And so, don’t ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you.
Mahmoud Darwich says:
As you prepare your breakfast — think of others (don’t forget to feed the pigeons). As you conduct your wars — think of others (don’t forget those who want peace). As you pay your water bill — think of others (think of those who have only the clouds to drink from). As you go home, your own home — think of others (don’t forget those who live in tents). As you sleep and count the stars, think of others (there are people who have no place to sleep). As you liberate yourself with metaphors think of others (those who have lost their right to speak). And as you think of distant others — think of yourself (and say, I wish I were a candle in the darkness).
Gennady Golovaty says:
The blind cannot look with wrath, The mute cannot yell with fury, The armless cannot take up arms, The legless cannot march forward. But, the mute can look wrathfully, But, the blind can yell furiously, But, the legless can take up arms. But, the armless can march forward.
I know some are terrified. They choose silence. But Audre Lorde says: Your silence will not protect you.
In the Moscow metro, they announce: Passengers are forbidden on the train heading to a dead end.
And the St. Petersburg [band] Aquarium adds: This train is on fire.
Lao Tzu, through Tarkovsky, says:
And most important, let them believe in themselves, let them be helpless like children. Because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.
Remember that fear eats the soul. Remember the Kafka character who sees “a gallows being erected in the prison yard, mistakenly thinks it is the one intended for him, breaks out of his cell in the night, and goes down and hangs himself”.
Be like children. Don’t be afraid to ask (yourselves and others), what is good and what is bad. Don’t be afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes. Don’t be afraid to yell, to cry. Repeat (to yourselves and others): 2+2=4. Black is black. White is white. I am a person, strong and brave. A strong and brave woman. A strong and brave people.
Freedom is a process by which you develop the habit of being inaccessible to slavery.”
Since the Donbas war, ethnic Buryats from Siberia have been dubbed as the “Putin’s Buryat warriors.” It all began with the Donbas war, where the Kremlin, advancing its Novorossiya project sent Russian armed forces posing as local Donetsk separatists. And while a soldier from Pskov was visually difficult to discern from a Donetsk miner, Buryats with their clearly Asian appearance, really stood out from the local population. This is when these Buryats were humorously called the Donbass Indians.
In Spring 2015, a 20-year-old Buryat tank crew member Dorzhi Batomunkuev, who had been severely burnt in combat in Logvinovo, gave an interview to the Russian Novaya Gazeta newspaper, in which he characterized Russian President Vladimir Putin as an insidious man who asserts to the entire world that “our military is not there,” and in reality, is pulling a fast one on the sly. Dorzhi confirmed that there are, in fact, Russian soldiers in the Donbas.
In Summer 2015, a Kremlin-backed project “The Net” released a video on behalf of “Putin’s Buryat warriors,” featuring several young men and women who attempted to contest reports in the media that Buryat soldiers participate in the military conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The crude video address is perhaps most memorable with its assertion that “the Ukrainian economy is free falling into the European pubic area of Concita Wurst,”—amplifying the Kremlin’s narratives tying European values to its supposed moral decay as manifested in acceptance of LGBTQ+ communities.
Members of the Kyiv Buryat community published a civilized counter, but lacking the hype, it did not go viral.
Then:
Buryats who are not thrilled with being appropriated as “the Russian World” mascots, launched a campaign, releasing a new video each week, featuring Buryats who demand for the war to stop.
Due to the absurd new Russian laws, according to which even uttering “No to War” is interpreted as “discrediting the activities of the Russian military”— a transgression that comes with a real and lengthy prison sentence, the videos mainly feature Buryats who live outside of Russia.
Dozens of Buryats have already recorded videos, including Buryats born or living in Ukraine. The campaign’s authors have collected enough materials for a series of videos.
At this point, Buryats are the only ethnic minority of Russia who has initiated this type of campaign.
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