Link here.
“How will the war in Ukraine and other geopolitical crises impact the global security order, and what do they mean for the power of deterrence ? “
Panel: John J. Mearsheimer and Carl Bildt; Moderator: Cecilie Hellestveit; Organizer: The Holberg Prize
By Dan Kovalik, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 11/30/22
Once a Pittsburgh sister city also known for its steel industry, Donetsk, and the greater Donbas region in which it is located, has been at war since 2014. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, 14,000 people died in this conflict, even before Russia began its military operations in February. I’ve just returned from there.
Before Russia’s intervention, the conflict had been between the people of that region and the government in Kiev, after an unconstitutional coup took 2014. This coup, known as “Maidan,” was — as then US Ambassador to Ukraine Victoria Nuland explained in a recorded telephone conversation — managed by the United States.
The coup brought to power a pro-Western, anti-Russian, government, which contained elements which were far-right and even Nazi. The best known element, as the Nation Magazine reported in 2019, is the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which has been part of Ukraine’s National Guard since 2014. Its commander Andriy Biletsky once wrote that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade…against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
As The Nation explained, the Azov Battalion is not merely Nazi in theory, but also in practice. In present-day Ukraine, “there are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.”
The American press wrote about this sporadically before this year. Now the press does backflips to obscure and deny this reality.
However, the people of Donetsk, who have lived this reality now for almost nine years, are very clear that all of this is real. Indeed, I met people in Donetsk (some quite elderly) who volunteered back in 2014 to defend their land and their people from the Kiev government’s aggression.
Much of the government views the predominantly ethnic Russian people of the Donbas as inferior beings whose language and culture, including the Russian Orthodox Church, should be eradicated. I actually traveled to Donestk in a vehicle laden with clothes destined for a Russian Orthodox monastery in Donetsk that is constantly being shelled by the Kiev government. These monks now live in underground rooms beneath the increasingly-destroyed monastery.
The people I met in Donetsk view their struggle as a fight against fascism. As one told me, there is a saying in Donetsk which goes, “First Stalingrad, now Stalino.” (Stalino was the former name of Donetsk.) Stalingrad, was where the Nazis were finally forced to retreat from Russia. The people of Donetsk are now dedicated to doing the same to the neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
And yes, despite how inconvenient to Americans it may be to accept this, they see Russia as their ally in this struggle.
While I was in Donetsk, the Kiev forces regularly shelled the area, firing over the frontlines to hit civilian targets in the city. Such targets included a school, the soccer arena and a building where residents come to gather fresh water, water being in short supply as the government in destroyed Donetsk’s water treatment facility some time ago.
Such shelling has been an integral part of life in Donetsk since 2014. You would not know this from the mainstream press coverage — the very worst and most dishonest coverage I have ever witnessed.
While the worst of the conflict came in the years 2014 and 2015, witnesses in Donetsk told me that the shelling from Kiev increased greatly in the days preceding the Russian intervention. On Feb. 22, 2022, just two days before the Russian intervention, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported 528 ceasefire violations, including 345 explosions, in Donetsk, and 1,182 ceasefire violations, including 1,075 explosions, in neighboring Luhansk.
Now, after the Russian intervention and after the referendum in September in which Donetsk residents voted to join the Russian Federation, the situation in Donetsk has actually improved. The streets are filled with cars, and people are going about their daily lives, including shopping and patronizing cafes and restaurants.
As I witnessed in Donetsk City and Mariupol, the Russian Federation helps with reconstruction. It has helped build huge housing projects and hospitals and restored damaged buildings.
With all of this said, I am not trying to convince the reader that the Russian intervention was justified, or that Russia’s own misdeeds should be excused. I am trying to push back against the cartoonish, Manichean view of the conflict being peddled by the US government and its compliant media — a view which is pushing us ever closer towards a cataclysmic war with Russia in which there will be no winners.
Another side of the story is not being told — a story about the forgotten people who have suffered under a regime backed to the hilt by the U.S., which acted in terrible ways and provoked the crisis. It is my hope that if this reality is taken into account, our leaders will work towards a negotiated settlement of the conflict rather than spending more billions of dollars on the hopes of a total victory which is neither possible nor desirable.
By Dmitry Kovalevich, New Cold War, 12/6/22
In this monthly update for November 2022, Dmitriy Kovalevich special correspondent in Ukraine for New Cold War, reminds us of the events that lead to the current SMO, and the events as they continue to unfold in the country, including the situation at the nuclear power plant in Zaporozhye, the strategic withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson and the grim details of what befell the city following the entry of the Ukraine military, leading to another flurry of duplicitous anti-Russian propaganda by the Ukraine authorities and others. He covers the targeting of Ukraine’s energy transmission system and the disastrous economic situation facing the population. He also looks at the efforts being made to draw the West into the conflict, and the increasing demands for a truce and negotiations in a Ukraine that is growing tired of war.
At the end of November, Ukraine will mark the ninth anniversary of the start of the ‘Euromaidan’ revolt that succeeded in overthrowing the country’s elected president and government some three months later.
This same month marks the ninth month since the start of the Russian special operation in Ukraine. That conflict which has so captured world attention is a direct consequence of the events of nine years earlier.
Few could have imagined in November 2013 that the current crisis in Ukraine – including the threat of war between global powers and artillery and mortar strikes by Ukraine against the nuclear power plant in Zaporozhye, the largest in Europe – would result from the overthrow of the elected president of the day.
At the time, President Victor Yanukovych, born and raised in Donetsk, postponed the signing of a trade agreement with the European Union, rightly considering that it would be unprofitable and harmful to the Ukrainian economy and to the people of the country. The subsequent Euromaidan protests, typically led by pro-Western NGOs, attracted armed, radical nationalists and neo-Nazis to their side, leading to a bloody drama in the center of Kyiv on February 20 and 21, 2014. Some 100 protesters as well as police were killed by sniper fire directed by the far-right paramilitaries that had joined the protests months earlier.
The coup in Kyiv on February 21 was soon followed by armed conflict in the Donbass region in the east of the country. This was sparked by the refusal by the people there to recognize the new, coup government. The newly installed regime in Kiev launched a military operation in the Ukrainian oblasts (provinces) of Donetsk and Lugansk in April-May, 2014. These were spearheaded by far-right and neo-Nazi military battalions when the existing Ukrainian army and national guard refused to follow order to fire on peaceful protesters.
The people of the two Donbass oblasts rushed to create self-defense forces, and in May they staged their first of several referendum votes in May 2014 to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. A second and definitive referendum was held at the end of September 2022 to join the Russian Federation. (Separate votes to join Russia were held at the same time in parts of the former oblasts of Kherson and Zaporozhye.)
This conflict dating from 2014 erupted into a full-scale military operation launched by the Russian Federation in February 2022. Its reasons, announced to the world months earlier, were, and remain, to end Ukraine’s provocative drive to join the NATO military alliance, impose a demilitarized status, and to end the dominance of neo-Nazi ideology in the country (what Russia calls a ‘denazification’).
In November, Russian troops withdrew from the city of Kherson and its surrounding region, which it had entered nine months earlier without a fight. Russian forces withdrew to more defensible positions on the other side of the Dnieper River from the city. For now, implementation of the September referendum in Kherson to join the Russian Federation is on hold. Most residents of the city joined the evacuation of the city by Russian forces. The remaining residents of the city are now being evacuated by the Ukrainian side. The city is now largely uninhabited.
With the approach of winter and Western supplies of long-range artillery pouring into Ukraine, the Russian military felt that it would be too costly and difficult to maintain a foothold on the ‘right bank’, as it is called, of the western bank of the Dnieper River. Following their withdrawal, the Russian forces blew up the bridges across the river. The Ukrainian army had been shelling these for half a year, largely to no avail, in order to disrupt the re-supply of Russian troops. There are no Russian forces remaining on the right bank of the Dnieper.
Two days following the Russian withdrawal, the Ukrainian army entered the city. It staged a “greeting” of Ukrainian troops for the Western media, involving small numbers of residents. Following the withdrawal, artillery duels commenced and continue to this day.
In a video broadcast by Agence France Presse, an alleged Kherson resident declares that there is no electricity, water, mobile connection in the city, but he is very happy anyway because, he says, he has freed himself from the Russians. The man was soon identified as Yevgeny Pondin, who lives in Kyiv – the commander of a company of the National Guard of Ukraine. Western media unabashedly covered up the entry of Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitaries into the center of Kherson, where they had openly posed bearing the flags of the army and secret police of Nazi Germany.
Kherson residents deemed to be ‘pro-Russian’ are being hunted down and imprisoned or killed. Alexander Malkevich, an adviser to the Russian governor of the Kherson region, said that the Ukrainian military has executed at least 100 civilians in Kherson and about 200 more civilians are missing. In most cases, the victims appear to be ordinary civilians who didn’t cooperate with the Russian administration. Most of those who did cooperate would have joined the Russian withdrawal.
Many of those remaining Kherson residents have been targeted with denunciation by people with personal enmity or claims of a personal nature. Such denunciations occurred massively in Ukraine during the Second World War, and many of those executed by the Nazis were not Jews, communists, or anti-fascist partisans; they were ethnic Ukrainians. For many, political loyalties, one way or the other, did not matter in the end.
In November, the Ukrainian military posted a video showing the executions of 12 Russian soldiers who had been taken captive in the Donbass region. This tactic of publishing massacres is akin to the ‘show executions’ conducted by ISIS in Middle Eastern countries. The purpose is to demoralize the enemy. Ukrainian authorities responded to the Russian and international outrage over the executions by saying that the prisoners had “treacherously” imitated a surrender and then tried to resist. A criminal case has been opened in Kyiv… against the executed prisoners of war.
President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko said that the execution was carried out to escalate the conflict, most likely at the directive of the United States. “What did the execution of Russian soldiers accomplish? Did the Ukrainian side want to provoke the Russians once again? They certainly achieved that. They are doing everything to escalate, and this is alarming. It suggests that the Americans strongly support them. Independent and smart people don’t do that,” Lukashenkotold an interviewer.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk says that according to the conclusions of a UN monitoring mission in Ukraine, the video of the killed Russian captives in Ukraine “is highly likely to be authentic”.
In November, the Russian Federation escalated missile strikes on the energy system of Ukraine, causing periodic blackouts. As a result of continued blackouts, almost all Ukrainian enterprises that have survived to this day have stopped working. As well, Ukrainian nationalist propaganda no longer reaches its audiences so easily due to the periodic blackouts of television and radio broadcasts and disruptions to Internet and mobile telephone communications.
Russian experts say that one of the main goals of such strikes is to force Kyiv to negotiate and accept Russian conditions, as well as to disrupt the logistics of military supply and resupply. The grounding of railway transport is a key objective because the country’s railway system is electrified and try as they might, the NATO countries cannot quickly step in and provide diesel locomotives because the track gauge of Ukraine (and Russia) dates from the Soviet era and is wider than the standard gauge of railways in western Europe.
Standardization is also a problem for Ukraine in repairing and restoring its electrical transmissions system. This was explained in a November 24 article in the Russian daily newspaper Vzglyad, which was boldly headlined (translation) ‘Only Russia can restore the energy system of Ukraine’. Western news media is reporting hopefully that countries in western Europe can supply Ukraine with the key electricity transformers it is losing to Russian missile attacks. But these reports are misleading because they are talking of supplying portable generators, which have nowhere near the capacity of electricity network transformers. [The full article in Vzglyad has been translated to English and published by New Cold War.org. It can be read here.]
The Russian military operation has deeply affected the working lives and incomes of workers and farmers in Ukraine. At least five million workers have lost their jobs in the country, according to Deputy Minister of Economy of Ukraine Tatiana Berezhnaya. For those workers lucky enough to still have work and income, those is smaller enterprises are facing unprecedented attacks against their right to organize a trade union and be represented by it.
According to Tatiana Berezhnaya, about seven million people have left Ukraine due to the hostilities. Most of these are women because authorities are preventing men from departing, due to compulsory military conscription. Hundreds of thousands have also left the Donbass region, to Russia; this was carried out by Russian and Donbass officials before the military intervention began.
Ukrainian border guards are now refusing almost everyone to leave the country, even women and children. They offer the excuse of electronic record keeping not working due to blackouts. In November, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine also officially banned men with a disability certificate from leaving the country. In other words, even legless and armless men are considered by the Ukrainian authorities as a potential military reserve.
Against this background, cases of attempts to escape from Ukraine by illegally border crossings have become more frequent. Many people are being detained each day by border guards. Others are being found frozen or drowned in the wintry mountains and rivers of the Carpathians region in western Ukraine.
For Kyiv in this situation, it is critical to draw the countries of the West more into a direct conflict with Russia. This was precisely the likely reason for the Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile which struck the village of Przewodów in Poland on November 15. The hope was that this and similar strikes could trigger direct NATO intervention – the Polish military, for example – by blaming them on Russian intervention. But the ruse quickly backfired as the source of the missile was not hard to determine: it flew north from Ukrainian territory. Despite statements by Poland, NATO and Washington acknowledging that the missile was Ukrainian, Kyiv denied the fact, which only worsened the public relations fiasco for it.
A number of Western countries, particularly Great Britain, are urging the Kyiv regime to continue waging its ghastly war of attrition. Already, more than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have lost their lives, according to reports across the media spectrum, with hundreds of thousands more injured. Thus do we see the concept of ‘a war to the last Ukrainian’ by NATO taking place.
The British Minister of Defense Ben Wallace has been particularly outspoken in this regard. “Given the advantage the Ukrainians have in equipment, training and quality of their personnel against the demoralized, poorly trained, poorly equipped Russians, it would be in Ukraine’s interest to maintain momentum through the winter,” Wallace told The Daily Beast on November 24. He added, “They have 300,000 pieces of Arctic warfare kit, from the international community.”
The Daily Beast also reminded that Wallace’s “intervention comes at a time when senior American officials have tried to nudge Ukraine away from the battlefield and towards the negotiating table”. This has been a common message in Western media of late, but there is little evidence to back it. To wit, the French and U.S. presidents affirmed in Washington on December 1 their common cause in Ukraine. CNN reports: “Macron told ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ on December 1, prior to meeting Biden, that firm U.S. support for Ukraine ‘is very important, not just for the Ukrainians … but for the stability of our world today’. He pledged France’s own increased military, economic, and humanitarian support to Ukraine.”
Some Telegram channels are explaining that Ukrainian society is tiring of the war but any cessation is fraught with the risk of internal social explosion. A writer on the Ukrainian Telegram channel Legitimny explains, “The Western lobby requires Zelensky to continue active military actions, otherwise the country could instantly ‘explode’ from within with protests and so on. There are more and more socio-economic problems in Ukraine but less and less money to address them. Although the sums being allocated by the West are ‘large’, the costs for Ukraine ‘self-sufficiency’ have increased tenfold. According to forecasts for December, January and February, there will be a need to fully provide food, water, heat to more than 15 million people, amounting to are additional monthly costs of some two to four billion U.S. dollars.”
The Telegram channel Kartel believes that whereas calls for a truce are on the rise in Ukrainian society, Ukrainian authorities are living in an illusory world, projecting patriotic illusions for others to believe but which they are now believing themselves.
Many Ukrainians are beginning to understand that the longer the military conflict lasts, the worse will become life and living conditions for the whole country. In response, government officials are again trying to convince people that Ukraine is on the verge of a grand victory and they must continue enduring all the hardships.
A writer on Kartel explains, “Zelensky’s entourage and the elite do not realize the conditions in which most of the country is living. That’s because the elites have everything, including the light, water and food that many Ukrainians now find in shorter and shorter supply.”
President Zelensky’s wife explains the situation in completely bizarre terms. She told an interview with Western media that “90 % of Ukrainians said they were ready to live with electricity shortages for two to three years if they could see the prospect of joining the European Union”. Only someone who has never lived for any stretch without electricity, water and heating could say such a thing… or a person who deliberately lies in order to retain power.
No opinion polling of Ukrainians has been conducted since the beginning of Russia’s military operation. Not a single sociological research institute has ever published survey results, or been permitted to. {This is not accurate. See here. I can’t say whether those results were published within Ukraine, but opinion surveys have been done since the start of the war – NB]
Ukrainian critics of the current government say that all they can do these days amidst the prevailing wartime censorship is to convey to ordinary Ukrainians the words of the leadership. Since 2014, Ukraine’s leadership communicates two completely different narratives: one for domestic audiences and one for Western governments and populations. Our authorities tend to underestimate losses and the level of destruction of infrastructure when speaking to Ukrainians. But they overestimate all this when addressing Western politicians asking for more money.
In the same way, Olena Zelenska tells the world that Ukrainians are ready to suffer for two or three years without electricity and water. But at home, her husband and his government tell the people that their problems will be solved within the next month or so. That, of course, is because it is unlikely that Ukrainians would agree to continue to suffer for years.
Against the backdrop of the energy and food crisis in Ukraine, more and more people are talking about more civilian evacuations. However, Ukrainian officials, in response, demonstrate even greater arrogance in assessing the situation. “Where to go? I ask again, where? Should everyone go to Poland? And who will represent the invincibility of the country then?” said Mykhailo Podolyak, the speaker of the Office of the President of Ukraine, at the end of November. Simply put, the Zelensky Office is denying Ukrainians the right to survive in order to demonstrate “invincibility” to Western partners, which in turn helps to receive billions more in Western financial assistance.
The nine months of ongoing war in Ukraine are the result of nine years of a coup staged, sponsored and organized in Ukraine by NATO countries; a civil war against the people of the Donbass region; and Kyiv’s refusal to comply with the Minsk agreement of February 2015. The West is trying hard to ignore all this, but the facts are inescapable.
Ukrainians find themselves on opposite sides of a terrible war, which will continue indefinitely if the British government, if not other NATO governments as well, have their way.
***
Dmitriy Kovalevich is the special correspondent in Ukraine for New Cold War. He writes a monthly report for New Cold War, as well as occasional, special reports.
By Gilbert Doctorow, Blog, 12/5/22
In this installment I offer both an observation that may be characterized as totally relevant to the ongoing war and an observation that is timeless and relates to what Russian society and behavior is all about. What these have in common is that they are firsthand observations, based on what I see and hear from real people in St Petersburg during this visit.
The first item comes from a 20-minute chat with a fellow who has been one of my best sources of information on the war thanks to his personal relations with siloviki, meaning in this case military intelligence officers, that go back to his college days and to his initial service as an administrator in the penitentiary system.
As many readers are aware, my pied à terre is a one bedroom apartment in the outlying Petersburg borough of Pushkin, which in pre-Revolutionary times was known as Tsarskoye Selo, literally, the tsar’s hamlet. Just 200 meters from our apartment complex is the Catherine the Great summer palace and park, which is a major attraction for both domestic and foreign tourists.
This area today is also home to an important military school which has students from Africa and other developing world regions enrolled alongside native Russians. There is a training base for helicopter pilots nearby. And there is a military hospital of national importance. It is from the latter that today’s news comes.
My acquaintance tells me that the hospital is now filled with wounded Russian soldiers from the Ukraine campaign, and in particular with maimed POWs who were released by the Ukrainian authorities in prisoner exchanges. The hospitalized include a good many traumatized soldiers who were savagely castrated or otherwise disabled by their Ukrainian captors.
If publicized, these cases would be far more inflammatory in broad Russian society than the horrendous video which circulated in social media a week ago showing the brutal execution of a dozen disarmed Russian POWs by jubilant Ukrainian soldiers. Clearly, the Kremlin is holding this back, lest detailed knowledge of the Ukrainian brutality unleash violent emotions in the Russian public.
In these circumstances, I call attention to the very difficult balancing act required of the Russian President. The man has nerves of steel. He is surely under great pressure from the patriotic hard-liners in the Kremlin who are au courant about the castrations and other evidence of Ukrainian depravity. One nod from Vladimir Vladimirovich and Kiev would be leveled to the ground in a matter of hours. It is tragic that Washington and Brussels confuse this restraint with incompetence, fear and other nonsense.
*****
My second item comes from my visit to the Mariinsky-2 opera house last night to see the star-studded cast performing Verdi’s Otello under the baton of maestro Valery Gergiev.
The evening was interesting in many ways, starting with the top of the house seats we occupied because we placed our orders only the day before, when most everything had already been sold out and went for eye-popping prices. Indeed, apart from our top balcony seats, all seats at the opera yesterday evening went for between 8,000 and 9,000 rubles, meaning 120 to 135 euros.
By an ironic twist, our second row balcony seats at 3200 rubles, or 45 euros, corresponded one-to-one to the seats my wife and I used to buy for $3.50 each at New York’s Met during my grad student days at Columbia in the late 1970’s. Those seats, like the ones we had last night, were very high but also very close to the stage, if off to one side, which is never popular with the general public but is loved by professional music critics both for price and comfort. The Met seats came with a little table and light for the occupants to read their scores. The Mariinsky seats were simply more ample and more comfortable than what Americans would call Family Circle seats facing the stage directly.
However, what I wish to emphasize is who sat up at the top. They were more uniformly well dressed and even chic than the public in the parterre at ground level or in the loges and lower tiers, where we normally would be sitting for an opera performance. Why is this so? Because the Mariinsky gives out a goodly number of orchestra level seats free to university students, pensioners and the socially disadvantaged, and they, by definition, are not swell dressers. The people who laid out 45 euros for the top of the house all paid from their own pockets and came dressed in the high fashion apparel that is still the cultural norm, even if it disappeared in the USA thirty or more years ago, when folks attending High Culture events just ‘came as they are,’ as if they were at the cinema. This dressing down took hold in Europe more recently, but it is widely seen there today.
Why do I call attention to dress codes? Because there is a great deal more in clothes than snobbery. Dressing down, coming to the opera in torn jeans and sloppy sweaters, is an unmistakable statement that the rest of the world can go to hell, that one is concerned and absorbed only with Number One.
Not so in Russia. The old saying that Russian girls are born in high heels remains utterly true even in the midst of the present dull mood driven by the war in Ukraine. And during the break in the three hour twenty minute performance, our balcony cohort did not whip out home-made sandwiches and drink from concealed flasks. No, they stood in line to buy caviar sandwiches and éclairs together with flutes of Russian sparkling wine at very fancy prices, though matched by superb quality of the products themselves. This evening was an event, and Russians love to party.
Earlier in the war, I remarked that the Mariinsky was likely having financial difficulties now that it had lost its substantial audience of well-heeled foreigners from London, Paris and New York. What I see now as I enter the Mariinsky Theatre website to order tickets is that they are filling every seat in the house this holiday season for performances of The Nutcracker or opera performances like last night’s Otello at 140 euros a seat. And the audience is 100% Russian. A new equilibrium has been established and Russia’s High Culture has met the challenge of the foreign exodus.
It bears mention, that notwithstanding the high prices practiced at these most sought-after shows, the audience had a surprisingly good balance of old and young, including those who clearly are not students. Moreover, the old are not as decrepit as in the Met, nor were there medics in the wings for emergency aid, as we saw at the Arena di Verona this past summer. The balance of men and women was also fairly close, which is not to be taken for granted in the musical world at large.
By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 12/5/22
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started last February, Mikhail Lobanov, a local political activist in the Moscow suburb of Ramenki, put a little sign on his balcony that said “No War.”
It sat there for months, apparently unnoticed, until one day police arrived at his door to arrest him.
Mr. Lobanov, a candidate for the Communist Party in last year’s municipal elections, is not the sort of person who is used to running afoul of Russian laws. But now he finds himself among the nearly 4,000 prosecutions under a pair of new laws that make it punishable to spread any “fake news” about Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, or to make any statement that authorities deem to “defame” Russia’s army or officials.
A growing number of cases involve people speaking informally in workplaces, classrooms, social media, and even in church. The effect is to put people on their guard, even in private settings, creating an atmosphere of pervasive fear that has not been widely felt in Russia since Soviet times.
“These are clearly oppressive laws intended to suppress any criticism related to the war,” says Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the Sova Center in Moscow, a human rights organization that specializes in the study of extremism. “The law on defamation is particularly odd, since defamation is normally a civil matter. Where there is criminal prosecution, it can only be aimed at suppressing criticism.”
“A bureaucratic machine is at work”
For most of the Putin era, average Russians had little to fear from any slip of the tongue or errant social media post, even as the state was selectively cracking down on avowed Kremlin opponents and pro-Western voices. Over the past nine months, it’s become a minefield for many more people, since the new laws are vague enough to trap almost any political speech, and law enforcement agencies seem bent on creating examples.
According to a study by the independent Public Verdict Foundation, about half of those arrested since the laws came into effect in March were charged with some kind of overt anti-war activity, such as attending a rally or displaying anti-war symbols.
But there have also been cases of people getting convicted for merely holding up a piece of blank paper in a public place, or a placard containing stars or asterisks rather than words. According to the group, Moscow-area peace activist Anna Krechetova was convicted and fined 50,000 rubles ($800) for carrying a sign that said “fascism will not pass.” Several people have been arrested for simply dressing in the yellow-and-blue colors of the Ukrainian flag.
Mr. Lobanov, after a sweep of his social media posts uncovered two more apparent infractions in his political commentary, spent 15 days in prison and paid 45,000 rubles in fines. Now, he is braced for more trouble.
“Once you get into politics in any form these days, I guess you have to expect this,” he says. “The police tell me it’s nothing personal, but they get lists from above and have to follow instructions. The courts just rubber stamp whatever they’ve been told. A bureaucratic machine is at work. … So far, I think I’ve gotten off rather easy.”
Alexei Onoshkin, an anti-war activist in the Volga city of Nizhni Novgorod, has seen a lot worse. He was arrested in August after authorities uncovered a social media post of his alleging that Russia had bombed a drama theater in the city of Mariupol where people were taking refuge. He was charged under the criminal part of the law on defamation and held in a SIZO (pretrial detention center) for several weeks until a court medical commission declared him insane and had him transferred indefinitely to a prison hospital.
In a voice message to the Monitor, Mr. Onoshkin also seemed to be bracing for worse to come. “Conditions in the hospital are better than in the SIZO, and the food is better, but my mood is heavy,” he said. “In my view it’s a blatant disgrace to put a person into prison, and then into a prison hospital, for political reasons.”
“It’s absurd, disproportionate punishment”
Experts say the current level of repression appears to be working, at least from the authorities’ point of view.
“I think it’s rather effective,” says Mr. Verkhovsky, the Sova Center director. “At first a big part of these prosecutions were for some street action, such as pickets or graffiti. But since summer it’s mostly about writing in social media. People who want to protest have been pushed from the streets to the internet. I don’t think the government’s purpose is to silence all criticism, but they do want to stop any public or organized expressions of it. In that, they seem to be succeeding.”
Most of the cases so far have resulted in fines of up to 100,000 rubles ($1,600). Repeat offenders, such as journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, who made headlines with an on-air protest back in March, can get prison terms. Ms. Ovsyannikova, currently facing a potential 10-year sentence for public protest, appears to have fled the country.
It’s hard to know how many people have been imprisoned under the criminal provisions of the two laws, but it is probably several dozen. The now banned human rights organization Memorial, which was co-awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this year, maintains a list of several hundred nonviolent dissenters that it regards as political prisoners. Most of those are being prosecuted for “religious reasons,” such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Islamists, but 116 are listed as “non-religious” offenders presumably being prosecuted for political reasons.
One such person is Alexei Gorinov, an opposition deputy of the Moscow City Council, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for distributing “fake information,” after he posted on YouTube a speech he made criticizing the war.
“It’s absurd, disproportionate punishment, clearly intended to suppress any public discussion of the war,” says Sergei Davidis, a lawyer with Memorial. “The basic meaning behind it is that a person must know that the information he is spreading is false, while the truth is what state bodies declare it is. Thus the state demonstrates what people can hear and what they cannot. Thus, Alexei Gorinov, who publicly declared that there is a war, and children are dying in it, has been put into prison for seven years.”
As long as the war continues, the environment for public freedoms is likely to deteriorate, says Mr. Verkhovsky.
“The government doesn’t really need to tighten the laws, but they will probably grow tougher,” he says. “There is a kind of repressive inertia at work. And Russian lawmakers always feel like they should be doing more. So, this atmosphere will probably just keep getting worse.”