This is my most powerful interview yet. I took Maria, a fierce liberal, anti-war protester to the FRONT LINES of the war in the Donbass to see things for herself, to speak to the people for herself. This woman, with balls of steel, even walked with me through the streets of Svyatogorsk, with Ukrainian snipers just 200 meters away, to speak to civilians trapped in their basements and bring them food. How much of what she believed was right? Or wrong? This is an interview you must see to believe. – John Mark Dougan
Under the pressure of war, crackdown, and emigration, Russia’s media landscape looks increasingly as it did in the bygone Soviet era.
In the Cold War, that meant a consolidated national press offering the official narrative with little political diversity, and a range of alternative voices based outside the country trying various means to penetrate official obstacles to reach Russian audiences.
It’s not quite that bad yet today.
The funding for state media has indeed tripled since the war began, even as laws to curtail critical journalism have proliferated. And most independent media – and the journalists who worked with them – have left Russia in recent months after being declared “foreign agents,” forbidden from reporting on the war and, in many cases, physically shut down by authorities.
But thanks to the advances and ubiquity of the internet, independent media today are able to make their voices heard in a way that was impossible during the days of the USSR. Some of them have established full-scale operations from a safe perch outside the country, aiming to bring alternative news and views to Russians online. Quite a few journalists have remained in Russia but retreated to obscure precincts of social media to express themselves, or to provide information anonymously for existing outlets.
“There are so many ways to reach people nowadays that were unimaginable in the past,” says Masha Lipman, co-editor of the Russia Post, an online journal of expert debate in English and Russian that still seems to be accessible in Russia without using a VPN. “As long as the internet exists, and the restrictions are not impenetrable – the Russian government is trying – then it’s as if the émigré press now has a real foothold and can compete in the Russian information sphere.”
Russians setting the agenda
Not every independent journalist has decamped abroad. Some continue working within the still-permitted spectrum, trying to produce valuable work within increasingly restrictive legal conditions. And a few say they’re just not leaving, no matter what.
“I was born in Russia and have lived here all my life. Why should I leave?” says journalist Vasily Polonsky. He’s worked for several alternative outlets, including TV Dozhd and the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and has been declared a “foreign agent” under Russian law. “Who will stay here to express a position different from the official line?” he asks. “As long as it’s possible, I’ll stay here and work, even if I can only seem to use about 15% of my professional capacities.”
But most of Russia’s critical media voices now operate outside the country – a situation that is starting to resemble the old Cold War.
Then, the Russian émigré press was largely confined to exiled readerships, with few opportunities to reach audiences inside the USSR. Only big state-supported radio stations such as Radio Liberty, the BBC, and Voice of America had the capabilities to counter Soviet jamming efforts and bring a different narrative to Soviet citizens in their own languages.
“In those days, millions would be listening, and they considered those signals from outside the country to be the voice of truth,” says Ms. Lipman.
But there are some important differences from the past, she says. “Those Cold War-era radio stations were run by foreign governments who were fighting their ideological battles with the USSR. Russians may have worked for them, but they were not in charge. Today Russians are running these [exiled] media ventures; they are the bosses and they set the agenda.”
The online newspaper Meduza, probably the most popular opposition-minded voice, decamped years ago to Latvia where, despite mounting difficulties with news-gathering inside Russia, it continues to make its coverage available to any Russian able to use a VPN. The TV station Dozhd was finally hounded out of its Moscow studios in March, after years of tightening regulations, and recently started broadcasting from a borrowed studio in Riga, using YouTube, a platform that has not yet been blocked in Russia.
“It didn’t make any sense to stay. We’d have been no use to anyone, including our families,” says Ekaterina Kotrikadze, news director at Dozhd. “This is really different. How do you reach people? How do you understand the country when you are outside of it?”
Staff members at Dozhd have been debating how to continue gathering news and contributions from inside Russia, bearing in mind that such work may be criminalized by Russian authorities, putting journalists at serious risk. They are especially concerned for people like Mr. Polonsky, Ms. Kotrikadze says.
“It’s just impossible to do your job as a journalist from inside the country now,” she says. “There are several journalists who remain and continue to work. Polonsky is one of ours who refuses to leave. What to do about him?”
“People were waiting for us”
Despite government efforts to silence them, independent media have been able to maintain a connection with their audience. Ms. Kotrikadze says her first show in late July from Latvia – she’s also an anchor – got a million and a half views, and a lot of positive feedback.
“People were waiting for us, and knew where to look,” she says. “We’ve kept in touch on Telegram channels, of course, and our relaunch is still partial. But we are back on the air.”
The now-closed Ekho Moskvy radio station has also fallen back on YouTube. Several of its top contributors now broadcast their familiar critical commentary on a channel they call Live Nail, though not full time.
YouTube remains a viable platform for alternative Russian media because its made-in-Russia replacement, RuTube, is still not ready after suffering from a devastating hacker attack early in the war. Many official Russian news channels, and pro-Kremlin voices such as Sputnik and Russia Today, still rely on YouTube, and hence it remains one of the few pluralistic platforms that Russians can access without a VPN.
The biggest worry, Ms. Lipman says, is that independent media have lost their former business models. “News outlets like Meduza and Dozhd used to get advertising income in the Russian market, and were relatively successful. Now they are completely cutoff from that, and it’s going to become a problem.”
“The situation is changing very fast”
Some independent outlets try to carry on within Russia, despite being labeled “foreign agents” and subjected to constant legal harassment. The newspaper Novaya Gazeta attempted to continue publishing without breaking any of the new laws concerning war reporting, but nevertheless was forced to stop in March. In early July, it successfully registered the first issue of a weekly magazine, called No, but its site was subsequently blocked.
Nadezhda Prusenkova, Novaya Gazeta’s press secretary, says the staff has no idea what will happen next.
“We’re going through a very difficult period,” she says. “It’s not clear whether we’ll open a new site, or issue another edition. Right now, all I can say is that the situation is changing very fast.”
One publication that continues with some tiny semblance of normality is the 20-year-old Caucasian Knot, which produces critical news coverage about southern Russia and the wider Caucasus region. It’s been declared a “foreign agent” and its website has been blocked in Russia. But despite pending court cases, the site has been able to keep working so far.
Its editor, Grigory Shvedov, attributes that to the fact that its area of focus is not Ukraine. It employs a network of regional journalists and bloggers, most of whom are not anonymous, to concentrate largely on human rights issues in the Caucasus. They have attempted to calculate casualty rates for Russian soldiers from the region who’ve been sent to Ukraine, but only using open and official sources.
“It’s not getting any easier,” he says. “Some can’t work at all. Some topics cannot be covered. But we want to keep working. And we intend to do that until it becomes impossible.”
The sentencing of WNBA star Brittney Griner to nine years behind bars and a fine of 1 million rubles – between US$10,000 and $20,000 depending on the exchange rate – should come as no surprise to those familiar with Russian law.
The country has long enforced strict drug laws and has a well-deserved reputation for zero-tolerance jurisdiction.
Indeed, the crime Griner was prosecuted of – smuggling narcotics in “significant amount” in violation of Article 229¹(2)(c) of the Russian criminal code – carries a minimum sentence of five to 10 years “deprivation of freedom” along with the fine, and the upper end of the spectrum seems to be common. The prosecutor in Griner’s case asked for 9 ½ years and, presumably, the maximum fine. He got most of what he wanted.
But as longtime scholar of Russian law, I can say the sentence announced in the Khimki District Court outside Moscow on Aug. 4, 2022, is more or less in line with what was expected. Moreover, I believe the sentence itself does little to change the equation when it comes to any quid pro quo with Russia regarding the potential exchange of detained nationals – any negotiation over her fate will now take place outside the courtroom.
The facts of the case
Griner was detained at Sheremetyevo Airport on Feb. 17, 2022, after a sniffer dog detected vaping cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. The Russian Criminal procedure codeprovided that Griner, as a foreigner with no permanent residence in Russia, was ineligible for bail.
The length of time Griner spent in detention after her arrest – nearly six months – is not unusual in drug cases of this nature in Russia and will be counted toward her sentence. And aside from the heightened international interest, the trial seemingly played out in line with Russian criminal procedure.
Under the Russian criminal procedure code, there are no “pleas”; prosecutors have to prove guilt regardless of any confession. And the evidence was there in the shape of the vape cartridges seized by customs officials along with witness statements.
In court, Griner acknowledged guilt and apologized for what she described as a mistake when packing her luggage. Her lawyers said that Griner’s cannabis oil was for medical purposes, to deal with chronic pain resulting from injuries sustained during her playing career. Griner, meanwhile, testified that she had no intention to break the law.
But in line with other jurisdictions, including the U.S., ignorance of the laws is no defense in Russia.
A pawn in US-Russian diplomacy?
If the fate of Griner was set the moment she was caught with an illegal drug in a Moscow airport, her future is less certain.
Griner has 10 days to appeal. The appeal will probably be heard rather rapidly, as standard Russian practice is to do so, but that also depends on the grounds of the appeal. If unsuccessful or unsatisfactory, additional appeals by way of cassation on issues of law may be heard at the discretion of the higher court, assuming grounds exist for this.
If all appeals fail, Griner’s lawyers can apply to a presidential commission for a pardon or hope for amnesty.
Given that Griner is being discussed in the context of a possible prisoner swap, it seems unlikely that the Kremlin will set Griner free without a reciprocal move from the U.S. government.
But Griner’s currency as a pawn in U.S.-Russian relations, with Moscow seemingly willing to barter over the future of the high-profile prisoner, will likely change little as a result of her sentence. To many in the U.S., nine years’ imprisonment may seem like a harsh penalty for cannabis possession. But in Russia, it is par for the course for this crime.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
William E. Butler is Distinguished Professor of Law at Penn State.
To explain the horrific events taking place in Ukraine, a chilling narrative about Russia being a fascist state run by “the dictator” Vladimir Putin has taken hold in the West.
The problem is many experts on Russia’s politics say it’s a false or misleading rendering of why Ukraine is engulfed in war.
This narrative goes this way: Just like Adolf Hitler, Putin is advancing a blood-thirsty, imperialistic, nationalistic and revanchist ideology to build a greater “Russian world” and it’s up to the West to stop him and save democracy.
In Ukraine, and increasingly in the West too, Russians are decried as “Ruscists” (a term merging Russians and fascists), Putin is demonized as “Putler,” Russian troops are called “orcs” and Russia is the “Land of Mordor,” the fictional land of dark evil forces in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books.
But this damnation that Russia is a new fascist power intent on world domination is not just false but dangerously inflaming a war that poses the risk of escalating into a world war, according to experts who study Russia and Putin’s regime.
“Since the mid-2000s, accusing Russia of being fascist has become a central narrative among Central and Eastern European countries, as well as among some Western policy figures,” wrote Marlene Laruelle, a French scholar and Russia expert at George Washington University. She is the author of the 2021 book “Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West.”
Among those who have accused Russia of fascism are Hillary Clinton, Prince Charles, Polish-American diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski, prominent Yale historian Timothy Snyder and a number of Putin’s political rivals, including Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess master and political activist.
It’s a thesis reinforced at the highest levels with U.S. President Joe Biden calling Putin a “butcher” and “war criminal” who must be removed from power. Politicians in Europe too routinely make the Hitler-Putin comparison.
In April, after French President Emmanuel Macron talked about the need to negotiate with Putin, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki shot back: “One should not negotiate with criminals, one should fight them … Nobody negotiated with Hitler. Would you negotiate with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot?”
The Putin-Hitler comparisons are promoted by magazines, newspapers and television news channels that regularly feature images of Putin looking deviously evil.
Nicolai Petro, a Russia expert at the University of Rhode Island, said using the fascist label “is commonly used to insult, rather than to illuminate.”
“There is no serious political project or party associated with the ‘Russian World’ in Russia today,” he said in an email to Courthouse News.
“This accusation performs the simple role of reducing Russia to being Other than the West, embodying everything that is not desirable for the West,” Laruelle wrote in an essay before the invasion. “If ‘Putin is Hitler,’ as some profess, who would want to negotiate with him and try to rebuild a constructive dialogue with Russia?”
In a more recent essay, she argued that using the fascist and Nazi label against Russia is “an easy, intellectually lazy way to make Putin understandable and predictable” and that it “does more to obscure than to shed light on our range of policy options for ending the conflict.”
Of course, those who accuse Putin’s Russia of being a fascist state have ample evidence to draw from.
Exhibit A: Hundreds of people defined as political prisoners – among them high-profile political figures such as Alexei Navalny – languish in Russian penal colonies. Since Putin ordered a full-scale attack on Ukraine, police have cracked down on anti-war protests. Recently, a councilor in a Moscow district, Alexei Gorinov, was sentenced to seven years for opposing the war.
Exhibit B: Since rising from obscurity to power in 1999, Putin has turned Russia into what many experts regard as a one-party authoritarian state with himself as the strongman on top. Putin is accused of overseeing a crooked system where his political and business allies have become fabulously wealthy through corruption.
Exhibit C: The Kremlin is a bastion of illiberal rhetoric infused by traditionalism, nationalism and militarism that represses dissenters who challenge the Kremlin’s politics, such as the closing of Russia’s most prominent human rights group Memorial International last December.
Critics point to Putin and his inner circle citing the works of Ivan Ilyin, a right-wing Russian nationalist scholar who left Soviet Russia in 1922 and later lauded fascist leaders, and Alexander Dugin, a contemporary Russian philosopher dubbed “Putin’s brain” by the Western press. Dugin’s writings create a disturbing worldview where an expansionist Russia leads the fight against Western liberalism.
Snyder, the historian at Yale, crystallized the arguments of those who see Putin as Hitler in an opinion piece for the New York Times in May entitled, “We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.”
“People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism,” Snyder wrote. “But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence – the murderous war on Ukraine.”
Snyder said Putin, like Hitler, must be defeated.
“A time traveler from the 1930s would have no difficulty identifying the Putin regime as fascist. The symbol Z, the rallies, the propaganda, the war as a cleansing act of violence and the death pits around Ukrainian towns make it all very plain,” he wrote.
“The fascist leader has to be defeated, which means that those who oppose fascism have to do what is necessary to defeat him,” Snyder concluded. “Only then do the myths come crashing down.”
Volodymyr Ishchenko, a Ukrainian political sociologist at the Free University in Berlin, said the fascist label being lobbed by both sides in the Ukraine war “has become completely discredited.”
While those in Ukraine and the West accuse Russia of fascism, Moscow too churns out propaganda alleging Kyiv’s government of being run by Western-backed Ukrainian “Nazis” determined to destroy Russia.
“It’s almost the most important legitimization for the war: That Russia is legitimately fighting Nazis in Ukraine,” Ischenko said in a telephone interview.
“One of the things that is strikingly different between Russia and classical fascist regimes is the actual lack of any ideological mobilization,” he said.
Unlike Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, he said post-Soviet nations like Russia lacked a “totalizing ideology.”
In Hitler’s Germany, the fascist ideology was embodied by the National Socialist Party with its millions of party members and the SS and the Hitler Youth (the Hitlerjugend), vast paramilitary and youth organizations.
Those elements, Ischenko said, were the “fundamentals of the real fascists” and “nothing like this existed” in Putin’s Russia.
That was the case before the Ukraine invasion. But what about now?
“With the invasion, the Russian political regime starts to take some of the elements that may turn Russia into something more similar to fascism,” he said. “Would it develop into some kind of new fascism – or fascism of the 21st century?”
He said it’s conceivable Russia could evolve into a fascist state centered on mobilizing Russians around an ideology and turn into a real “pro-Putin movement.”
“That is quite possible,” he said, “and that would make the Russian political regime stronger in contrast to that paternal authoritarianism which has dominated post-Soviet politics for the past 30 years.”
Laruelle agreed that the Ukraine war may move Russia toward fascism.
“It is a danger. I think it has been moving toward that with the war,” she said in a telephone interview.
She said the rhetoric from some Russian elites, which she called the “party of war,” is now very close to what she would call fascist.
However, she added in her recent paper that the “party of hawks shouldn’t become the tree hiding the forest” and that much of Russia’s elite are “uninterested in ideology” and that the hawks “should not be read as the position of the whole state.”
She said a fascist state is best characterized as one that advocates its rebirth through violence and relies on the “heavy mobilization of the population” around a “cult of war.”
Until now, she said Putin has only openly expressed ideas that could be called fascist during a March 16 speech where he talked about Russia’s “self-purification” from “scums and traitors” to make the country “stronger.”
But she said Russian authorities “do not celebrate war, but on the contrary hide it and have even passed a law that condemns those talking about a ‘war’ and not a ‘special military operation’ to up to 15 years in prison.”
She added that the regime is trying “to avoid actual military mobilization, as a large-scale draft of young men would force a recognition that the ‘operation’ is indeed a ‘war’ and could jeopardize the Russian people’s passive consensus around the regime’s ‘special operation.’”
Until now, Russians have not shown to be fanatical about the war, for example with rallies and parades, and attempts to force society to show its support for the war “have been manufactured in a pretty poor, Soviet-inspired manner,” Laruelle wrote.
“Moreover, while youth support is a central component of any fascist regime, in Russia, the youth are the most unreliable part of the population from the regime’s point of view, and the least supportive of the war,” she argued.
She cited surveys of Russians that find most people see the conflict “as a geopolitical struggle with the West” and that there is not any “particular enthusiasm for the more cultural, political, and genocidal aims of liquidating Ukraine’s statehood and nationhood.”
But with the war at danger of becoming prolonged and Russia facing ever more difficulties, Laruelle warned the Russian regime “has a real risk of shifting toward this kind of mobilization of society, and this totally utopian vision of the future.”
She wrote that a rise in paramilitary groups inside Russia – which have been cultivated by Putin’s regime – “would constitute compelling evidence that the Russian state apparatus is becoming fascist.”
*You can read Marlene Laruelle’s recent in depth academic article, “So, Is Russia Fascist Yet?” here. Purchase is required. (Spoiler alert – the answer is still no.) – Natylie
By Margarita Lyutova. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale, Meduza, 8/10/22
In late July, a team of researchers from Yale published a report titled “Business Retreats and Sanctions Are Crippling the Russian Economy.” Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the same team has maintained a list of international companies that have ceased operations in Russia in response to the war. The project is led by management and corporate responsibility expert Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management and the founder of Yale’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute. The report has been cited widely in recent weeks, but Sonnenfeld is neither an economist nor a Russia specialist, and experts have raised doubts about some of the report’s claims. Economic journalist Margarita Lyutova explains why the researchers’ conclusions might be worth taking with a grain of salt.
Apples to oranges
In early March, soon after the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, international corporations start withdrawing from Russia en masse. Some cited ethical reasons, while others pointed to new logistical difficulties resulting from Russia’s sudden economic isolation. On March 6, Yale Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and a team of researchers that included his students published a list of 200 companies that had already announced they would either cease or limit their operations in Russia.
A second list, published alongside the first, contained 30 companies that had “remained in Russia with significant exposure.” But the authors’ analysis raised questions. A graph that was meant to compare the companies’ varying levels of involvement in the Russian economy used different data points for different companies: in some cases, it showed the number of branches or franchisees a company still had in Russia, while in others, it showed the total percentage of the company’s revenue that could be attributed to its operations in Russia. Still other companies were marked with notes saying their level of involvement in the Russian economy had “not [been] disclosed,” despite the fact that several of those companies publish public reports online that could have been used to assess their presence in Russia. The authors also didn’t explain why they had chosen these specific companies out of all of the international companies that remained in Russia.
On March 7, two companies on the “remained in Russia” list — EY (Ernst & Young) and Procter & Gamble — announced they were pulling out of the Russian market. Shortly after, Sonnenfeld began telling journalists that his list had been responsible for many companies’ departure from Russia, though he didn’t give specific examples. On March 11, the Washington Post published an article in which Sonnenfeld said that “over two dozen” companies had requested to be added to the list in a single day.
On July 22, Sonnenfeld and his coauthors published a report on the consequences of sanctions and the exodus of companies from Russia on the academic paper repository SSRN (formerly the Social Science Research Network). In the weeks since it was published, the report has had a huge impact: according to SSRN, it’s been downloaded over 66,000 times. A number of media outlets, including the Financial Times, CNBC, and Deutsche Welle, have cited it.
But even a cursory glance at the report raises some questions about its reliability. SSRN is intended to be a platform for academic articles, but the Yale report falls short of academic standards. For one thing, it’s missing a list of references, an appendix with data used by the authors, and a methods section, which would allow other researchers to assess its validity.
The claims made in the report are far-reaching. Its authors assert that “Russian domestic production has come to a complete standstill with no capacity to replace lost businesses, products and talent,” and that “there is no path out of economic oblivion for Russia as long as the allied countries remain unified in maintaining and increasing sanctions pressure against Russia.” Claims that economic sanctions are ineffective, they say, are unfounded.
The paper is based on both the authors’ own list of companies that withdrew from Russia and an analysis of statistics regarding the Russian economy. The authors estimate that “as a result of the business retreat, Russia has lost companies representing ~40 percent of its GDP,” but don’t explain what time period they used to calculate this figure or whether they took into account the businesses that sold their assets to Russian companies.
Additionally, the current version of the list includes only 311 companies that have left Russia completely; another 500, the authors say, have left temporarily and retained the ability to return. Nonetheless, they refer to the economic damage done by the withdrawal of “over 1,000” companies.
The report contains other contradictions that don’t take an economics degree to spot. At one point, for example, the authors write that Putin’s reckless wartime economic policy decisions have “sent his government budget into deficit for the first time in years.” Later in the report, though, they include a table that shows that Russia had a deficit in both 2020 and in 2017.
Those pesky local factors
According to Alexander Isakov, the head of Bloomberg’s economics team, Sonnenfeld and his colleagues also failed to take into account some important factors that are specific to Russia. For example, citing data from Rosstat, the authors write that even official statistics from the first quarter of 2022 indicate a major downturn in a number of sectors of the Russian economy when compared to those from 2021: they calculate a 62 percent decline in the construction sector, a 55 percent decline in the agriculture sector, and a 25 percent decline in the manufacturing sector.
The authors note that the data doesn’t take into account seasonal factors, but according to Isakov, seasonality can’t be discounted: indicators from each year’s first quarter are always significantly lower than those of the preceding year’s last quarter. This is due to a combination of the holiday season (which includes fewer workdays), Russia’s climate (which affects construction), and the fact that there’s no harvest in the winter. When all of this is taken into account, Russia actually showed a small GDP increase of 0.5 percent in the year’s first quarter, then a decline in the second quarter.
Isakov was clear that his goal was not to disparage Sonnenfeld and his colleagues; he was simply pointing out their errors in an effort to get closer to the truth. “Understanding conditions on the ground in [Russia] is more important than ever,” he concluded, “and [the] report is a commendable effort to do just that.”
