By Isabel van Brugen, Newsweek, 8/1/24

Russian President Vladimir Putin ramped up his war machine purge with new arrests this week.

Vladimir Pavlov, the head of the Russian Defense Ministry’s procurement arm, JSC Voentorg, was detained and accused of fraud, the country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said, state-run news agency Tass reported on Thursday.

JSC Voentorg is a contractor of the Russian Defense Ministry and provides catering and laundry services for the Russian army.

According to Russian investigative site The Insider, Pavlov is a longstanding business partner of the former mistress of ex-Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who was removed from his post in May after holding the position for 12 years, in a surprise shake-up of the department.

Pavlov stands accused of the “theft of funds on an especially large scale from the budget of the Russian Federation during the execution of government contracts for the needs of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation,” Irina Volk, a representative for the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs told reporters on Thursday.

The official is accused of working with accomplices to purchase army toiletry bags at inflated prices between December 2019 and December 2022, and profiting from the scheme.

Newsweek has contacted Russia’s Defense Ministry for comment by email.

Separately on Thursday, Sergei Sukhov, a prominent manager of a military construction company, was arrested in an embezzlement case, RBC reported.

Previously, Andrei Belkov, the director of the Defense Ministry’s Military Construction Company, had been accused of abuse of power in the execution of a state defense order.

He was detained for purchasing a tomograph at an inflated price while he was the head of another military organization under the defense ministry—the Main Military Construction Directorate for Special Facilities, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported, citing security agency sources.

Belkov’s work was supervised by former Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, who was arrested on April 23 on suspicion of taking bribes. Since Ivanov’s arrest, numerous top officials at the ministry and general staff have been detained by authorities.

A thorough investigation is being conducted into contracts concluded during Belkov’s leadership of the Defense Ministry’s Military Construction Company, as well as into his personal earnings and his nonofficial connections, Kommersant reported.

“There is a fierce cleanup underway,” a source close to the Kremlin and Defense Ministry told the independent [western funded] Russian news outlet Moscow Times in May. “There is still a long way to go before the purges are finished. More arrests await us.”

YouTube link here.

Netflix is now carrying a mockumentary purporting to showcase the heroism of Ukraine’s 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, which is led by the infamous neo-Nazi Andriy Biletsky. The film’s director has said the fake documentary will be privately screened for the Pentagon and US Senate.

YouTube link here.

Meduza, 6/28/24

On June 27, Russia’s Federal Statistics Service (Rosstat) published the country’s annual mortality data for 2023. Like that of the previous year, the new data shows a sharply elevated excess mortality rate among young men relative to the situation before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Last year, Meduza and journalists at Mediazona worked with Tubingen University statistician Dmitry Kobak to estimate the Russian military’s total losses in 2022. The new Rosstat data allows us to continue the analysis. According to the 2023 numbers, excess male mortality didn’t just remain high last year — it nearly doubled compared to 2022.

How we use all-cause mortality data to estimate military deaths

The demographic data Rosstat published online on June 27 includes Russia’s total number of deaths in 2023 broken down by gender, age, and region (including Crimea but not the other Ukrainian regions annexed by Russia). The method we use to estimate Russian military deaths based on these numbers was developed by statistician Dmitry Kobak and his colleagues in 2023. Among other things, it effectively eliminates the impact of COVID-19, which contributed significantly to the overall number of deaths in Russia in 2022, especially among older age groups. By isolating the excess deaths among men that were not a result of the pandemic, we can determine the approximate number of combat-related deaths.

We began by calculating the ratio of male deaths to female deaths in each age group while accounting for existing long-term trends. Men in Russia have always had a higher mortality rate than women in almost all age groups — and this isn’t unique to Russia. In the years before the full-scale war in Ukraine, however, this ratio was steadily decreasing, primarily due to a reduction in mortality rates among men. The trend was especially strong among young people, whose deaths are less common overall and mostly result from external rather than natural causes. After Russia launched its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, however, the male-to-female mortality ratio surged.

Because women have been almost completely absent among the military deaths confirmed by Mediazona and BBC News Russian, mortality among women can be used as a “benchmark” for calculating the expected number of deaths among men. To do this, Kobak and his co-authors use the long-term trend of the male-to-female mortality ratio to predict what it would be in a given year without the war. They then multiply this ratio by the current number of deaths among women that year. The difference between the actual number of deaths among men and the number we would expect in a hypothetical scenario where there is no war gives us the excess mortality rate for men.

The results of these calculations, conducted a year ago by Kobak and his co-authors with the data from 2022 and again this year using the data from 2023, indicate:

-24,000 excess deaths among men in 2022 (with a 95 percent confidence interval between 22,000 to 26,000)

-40,500 excess deaths among men in 2023 (with a 95 percent confidence interval between 39,000 and 42,000)

-64,000 excess deaths among men over both years (with a 95 percent confidence interval between 61,000 and 67,000)

The highest number of excess deaths over this two-year entire period was among men ages 35–39. This group had nearly 17,000 excess deaths — approximately one quarter of all of the excess deaths among Russian men. The biggest increase between the two years was among men ages 25–29: excess mortality in this group nearly doubled compared to expected levels.

What’s new in this data? And how does it compare to other military death calculations?

The calculations based on the new Rosstat data generally confirm other estimates of Russia’s military deaths calculated by Meduza and Mediazona based on records from Russia’s National Probate Registry. In the last update to these calculations, we estimated Russia’s total losses in the full-scale war up to the end of 2023 at between 66,000 and 88,000 people, with the figure most likely around 75,000.

This is somewhat higher than the 64,000 deaths that the Rosstat data suggests. The discrepancy could be due to a number of factors:

-The estimates based on Probate Registry data involve a degree of randomness, as the registry records inheritance cases, not deaths, and there are a number of reasons a person might choose to file an inheritance claim or not.

-The composition of Russia’s military personnel may have changed in ways that our model based on the Probate Registry failed to compensate for. We took into account changes in the age distribution of soldiers as well as their previous military affiliation (for example, the large influx of prisoners in 2023 and the sharp decrease in the proportion of career military personnel in 2022). The military’s makeup has undergone numerous changes throughout the course of the war, however, and our model cannot identify and compensate for all of them. For example, we have no information about the differences in the income level or property of the soldiers going to war today compared to two years ago.

-Rosstat may have excluded some “military” deaths from this dataset and instead included them in the statistics for Russia’s “new regions” (the Kremlin’s term for the Ukrainian territories Russia has annexed). There have been isolated cases that suggest this practice exists, but there’s currently no reliable data on how widespread it is.

It’s worth noting that one of the conclusions of our analysis based on Probate Registry data was recently confirmed by previously unreleased Wagner Group financial documents obtained by Mediazona. We estimated that the total number of deceased prisoners from June 2022 to July 2023 was approximately 16,000 individuals. Taking into account random error, this coincided closely with the figure listed in Wagner Group’s documents: 17,251.

By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 6/26/24

Islamist extremists killed at least 21 people in coordinated attacks against minority Christians and Jews in Russia’s southernmost, multiethnic but mainly Muslim republic of Dagestan on Sunday – the third major terrorist incident in Russia in as many months, according to the government.

Sunday’s deadly attacks appear to have been directed equally against the republic’s small communities of Jews and Orthodox Christians. The attackers struck a police station and four places of worship in two Dagestani cities, demonstratively executing an Orthodox priest and burning down the only synagogue in the ancient city of Derbent. Last October, rioters at the airport in the Dagestani capital, Makhachkala, unsuccessfully tried to storm an airliner that had just arrived from Tel Aviv in what was widely viewed as an antisemitic reaction to the war in Gaza.

Leaders of both groups were quick to point to a wider threat to Russia’s social stability.

The attackers’ “undoubted goal is to kindle the flames of hostility, to sow the seeds of hatred and mutual hostility,” Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill told journalists. “The future of Russia largely depends on suppressing attempts to radicalize religious life and all manifestations of extremism and ethnic hatred.”

The president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, Rabbi Alexander Boroda, similarly warned that singling out places of worship threatens to raise social tensions. “People start to be afraid, stop trusting each other. This generates hatred and aggression, which undermines harmony in society and poisons relations between people.”

Russian society seems quite stable on the surface. The country is overwhelmingly secular. Almost 80% of Russians are Slavs, most self-identifying as Orthodox Christians, although most say that they seldom go to church.

There are around 100 other ethnic groups, and three other recognized state religions – Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam – which in some places constitute local majorities in 21 ethnic republics spread across the country. About 18% of Russians are Muslim, but they are mostly concentrated in several republics, including Dagestan, one of the poorest, and Tatarstan, one of the richest.

Some analysts worry that violent Islamist extremism may be reviving after nearly two decades of relative quiescence following Russia’s suppression of Islamist rebellion in the Caucasus republic of Chechnya in the early 2000s. During the previous decade, thousands died in Moscow and other cities across Russia, in airliner bombings, apartment explosions, sieges of a school and a theater, metro bombings, and other attacks by Chechen-linked militants.

Barely three months ago, Islamist extremists struck a Moscow concert venue, killing 130 people. Moscow rhetorically blames the attack on Ukraine and the West but admits it was actually carried out by Tajik citizens linked to the international organization known as Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), which is based in Afghanistan and has been declared a terrorist group by Moscow. Earlier this month, ISIS-linked prisoners took two guards hostage in a southern Russian jail, leading to a special services assault that killed six.

Grigory Shvedov, editor of The Caucasian Knot, which produces independent reporting from the wider Caucasus region, says that the Ukraine war is one factor in the emerging trend, perhaps because security services are distracted. But the war in Gaza has also seriously riled up populations in heavily Muslim regions, especially more impoverished and tradition-minded places like Dagestan.

“People are watching the news daily and seeing what is happening in the Gaza war, and when these attacks against Jews occur, they approve of it,” he says. “The riot at the airfield last October was unarmed, but the attacks against the synagogues last weekend were with deadly force, and people were killed. This is a new target, and I guess it’s because ISIS and local Islamists perceive that this is a vulnerable issue, and the public mood will support attacks on synagogues.”

Though interethnic strife tends to be rare, hostility toward Russia’s large communities of migrant workers, who tend to be mostly Muslims from former-Soviet Central Asia, has been on the rise since the Moscow attack by Tajik citizens in March.

“In our surveys, we note an increase in public concern about becoming victims of a terrorist attack,” says Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent [western backed] polling agency. “Popular dislike of migrant workers is always high, but the fear of interethnic tensions within Russia is still minor, though growing somewhat.”