From [TBC] To The Polar Lands - Rolling Russia / "Near Abroad" News Thread

Looks like today could be the day someone finally opens the box on Schrödinger's Karimov, though the new Reuters headline "Karimov dies - diplomatic sources" still links through to an article about him being critically ill and Nazarbayev going to pay him a visit.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-uzbekistan-president-health-idUKKCN1180A8?il=0

It appears to have been confirmed by his family (in true Central Asian style) via Instagram.

There is a lot of speculation that the succession was more or less finalised when Gulnara was given the boot for being too fabulous but nobody seems to know who is taking over.

Was he the one with the crazy pop star plutocrat daughter?

Yep - who hasn't been seen for two years.

Yeah I just read that! Good luck Uzbecks.

tbh, as long as whoever comes in doesn't boil dissidents alive and shorten the school year so nine-year-olds can do extra unpaid forced labour in the cotton fields they at least have a shot at being an improvement.

Former Gawker co-owner Viktor Vekselberg is currently having his offices raided and top management staff interviewed by police over allegations of corruption. His mining business is accused of bribing the regional government of Komi.

It's presumably linked to the criminal case against the former governor of Komi, Vyacheslav Gaizer, who's accused of running an organised crime ring. When police searched his property, they found 60kg of jewelry and 150 watches - worth between $30k and $1m each.

The offices of Kiev oligarch Dmytro Firtash's TV station, Inter, were set on fire in an arson attack yesterday - with staff still inside. It has been accused of being too sympathetic to Russia.

http://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/inter-tv-studios-set-ablaze-in-arson-attack-422228.html

Depressing to see the very good polling operation Levada potentially blacklisted by the Russian government under laws designed to give extra scrutiny to NGOs receiving money from foreign actors - in this case, allegedly, the U.S. government:

https://themoscowtimes.com/news/levada-center-blacklisted-55217

Hopefully they will win the appeal. There is speculation it has been timed to stop them reflecting a dip in a United Russia's ratings ahead of the election.

idk whether it's connected to the Vekselberg investigation but the police raided the home of one of Russia's top anti-corruption officials at the weekend and found $122m in cash, which will take some explaining.

https://www.rt.com/news/358891-russia-corruption-officer-dollars/

He was keeping it safe from evildoers

State Duma elections today - the most notable thing seems to be a vastly reduced turnout so far. Moscow region has consistently registered about 50% turnout by 6pm in recent elections, down to 29% today. No obvious enthusiasm for opposition parties but potentially a weaker show of support for United Russia than in years.

First exit polls have United Russia on 45, the far-right Liberal Democratic Party and the ghastly Communist Party on 15 apiece, the far-right/centre-left mishmash of A Just Russia on 8 and the main liberal party, Yabloko, on 3.5 - likely to miss the cut to get any state funding.

https://mobile.twitter.com/olliecarroll/status/777569666436915200/photo/1

https://themoscowtimes.com/photogalleries/election-2016-vote-for-55364

I came across these campaign posters today. My favourite is the PARNAS party one.

This is interesting:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-corruption-idUSKBN12V1EN

There's a new e-declaration system which Ukrainian politicians are meant to use to list their assets - tied to the ongoing IMF threats to turn off the money tap if corruption isn't tackled. The Prime Minister, who is 38, has a salary of $3000 a year and afaik has only ever held similarly-paid public sector jobs, declared 15 properties and $1.8m in bundles of physical cash. Others have been declaring million-dollar wine collections, luxury watches and sports cars.

I'd still assume it's only a fraction of their actual wealth but it's interesting, and probably positive, that it's being done at all.

Moldova's presidential election is going to a second round with neither of the candidates getting the 51% they needed in the first vote. Igor Dodon, who's a great admirer of Putin, should win comfortable barring an upset - having got 48.5% vs the pro-EU candidate's 38%.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37814503

It also looks like Georgian Dream, possibly the only political party named after a rap track released by the founder's son, has taken a huge majority in their elections - trouncing the corpse of Misha Saakashvili's party.

They're generally in favour of the EU (both parties are) but seen as much closer to Russia than the opposition.

*comfortably*

Lots of strange goings-on in Montenegro at the moment.

The government claims to have foiled a plot to take over parliament on election day (16th October) and kill the newly-installed PM, replacing them with a nationalist coalition. Supposedly, 500 people were set to storm the building with the help of 'hired sharpshooters'. The police seized barbed wire, knuckle-dusters and baseball bats and arrested twenty people, all Serbian nationals afaict, on the 16th - including a former police commander. The special prosecutor has said that at least two Russian nationalists were involved in organising / directing the plot.

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/montenegro-s-prosecution-says-nationalists-from-russia-behind-coup--11-06-2016

Seventeen of the twenty people have been released without charge already and the three still being held have not been charged, as yet.

Misha Saakashvili has quit as head of the Odessa region:

https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/saakashvili-resigning-post-odesa-regional-state-administration-head.html

He claimed the Kyiv government are "filth, scum, traitors to the revolution and war profiteers" and seems to have accused Poroshenko of being in league with the Odessa mafia:

https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/saakashvili-resigning-post-odesa-regional-state-administration-head.html

He's pretty popular with a section of the public but has had next to no official support for months and can't get anything done.

idk why i posted that link twice.

His (Dutch) wife Sandra Roelofs - once first lady - is running for parliament in Georgia and it looks like she will get a seat. Which I find rather odd since her husband is exiled from the country isn't he?

That's interesting.

There is an open case against him for abuse of power so, if he did go back, he'd be arrested. iirc one of the reasons he gave up his Georgian passport and took Ukrainian citizenship was to avoid being deported.

There are competing theories as to why he quit - one is that he still has his eye on going back to Georgia and feels that the problems in Ukraine are going to taint that. Another is that he's naturally impulsive and easily frustrated and just wasn't cut out for the slow grind of systemic reform.

*Extradited, rather than deported.

Thanks SV. Those theories do not necessarily compete though, they're probably both not far off from the truth.

https://www.ft.com/content/0c129a2c-81a0-3e3a-b17b-792646ea85eb

Estonia’s prime minister has lost a parliamentary no confidence vote, opening up the possibility that a pro-Russian party could join a new government at a sensitive moment.

They're pretty benign for a "pro-Russia" party, tbf, and have mainly won their support from the portion of Russian-Estonians allowed to vote by campaigning on economic issues like increasing the minimum wage, iirc. They're pretty firmly European and would just be one partner in a coalition (though i would guess they'd become the senior one).

Igor Dodon has won the Moldovan election, as expected:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37970155

Describing it as 'pro-Russia' vs 'pro-Europe/US' is an oversimplification. There's a lot of domestic politics that gets glossed over. This probably didn't help though:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/world/europe/moldova-vlad-plahotniuc.html?_r=0

The Bulgarian presidential election has also gone to someone aiming for a pragmatic balance between Russia and the EU - and capitalising on disenchantment with membership:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bulgaria-election-idUSKBN13801Q?il=0

This is an interesting piece on the arms race between Armenia and Azerbaijan:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-13/kamikaze-drones-russian-missiles-jolt-oldest-ex-soviet-conflict

Azerbaijan's military budget is higher than Armenia's entire state budget. Both sides are buying from Russia - with Azerbaijan also using Israel as a supplier of weaponised drones.

Azerbaijan look the odds on favourites in terms of GDP, military strength, powerful allies etc if it kicked off. But they didn't seem to do so well last time.

Wasn't that before the oil boom?

Alexei Ulyukayev, the Russian Economy Minister, has become the first serving minister to be arrested since Beria:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37983744

It looks like the FSB might have run a sting operation culminating in him being caught asking for $2m to make sure the sale of Bashneft to Rosneft went through.

As the BBC article indicates, it's an odd one to start with - Bashneft and Rosneft are both mostly owned by the government.

Sceptics are split between "nobody is going to try to shake down Igor Sechin" and "$2m seems unrealistically small".

so SV or someone else, can you recommend a good English-language book on Putin and/or his rise to power?

i have seen masha gessen's 'man without a face' praised but have not read

I don't think there will be a good Putin book until after he is dead tbh. I tried a couple of them, including the Gessen one and found it quite sketchy/gossipy and not very compelling.

I keep meaning to go back to Kotkin's Armageddon Averted but I don't think that was in the same class as his Stalin book and don't feel compelled to finish it.

I would steer clear of Gessen, tbh.

From what I have seen of it, and her journalism more generally, Anna Arutunyan's The Putin Mystique might be a good bet in his popularity and leadership style but idk how much it deals with his rise to power.

Alex Navalny has announced he will run against Putin for the presidency in 2018.

His first set of policy announcements includes banning people from Central Asia and the Caucasus from visiting Russia without a visa.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/world/europe/vladimir-putin-russia-fake-news-hacking-cybersecurity.html

CAMBRIDGE, England — His indomitable will steeled by a dozen years in the Soviet gulag, decades of sparring with the K.G.B. and a bout of near fatal heart disease, Vladimir K. Bukovsky, a tireless opponent of Soviet leaders and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, is not a man easily put off his stride.

But he got knocked sideways when British police officers banged on the front door of his home on a sedate suburban street here early one morning while he lay sick in bed and informed him that they had “received information about forbidden images” in his possession.

In April last year, the veteran Soviet dissident, a onetime confidant of Margaret Thatcher, finally found out what was going on: The Crown Prosecution Service announced that he faced five charges of making indecent images of children, five charges of possession of indecent images of children and one charge of possession of a prohibited image.

The case was supposed to go to court in May in Cambridge but, after Mr. Bukovsky, 73, entered a not-guilty plea it was delayed until Dec. 12. This followed a prosecution request for more time to review an independent forensic report on what had been found on Mr. Bukovsky’s computers and how an unidentified third party had probably put it there.

“The whole affair is Kafkaesque,” Mr. Bukovsky said in an interview. “You not only have to prove you are not guilty but that you are innocent.” He insisted that he was the victim of a new and particularly noxious form of an old K.G.B. dirty trick known as kompromat, the fabrication and planting of compromising or illegal material.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/dec/12/soviet-dissident-vladimir-bukovsky-downloaded-thousands-of-child-abuse-images-uk-court-told

In an interview, Bukovsky told detectives he had become interested in child abuse images in the 1990s in the context of a debate on the control and censorship of the internet. “He became curious,” Carter said. Bukovsky then looked for and discovered this material online, the prosecutor said.

“Bukovsky said his initial curiosity turned into a hobby, rather like stamp collecting,” Carter said. The dissident continued to download images between 1999 and 2014, and estimated that he had accumulated a collection of “1,500 movies”. His interest varied year by year. The last downloads took place days before his arrest.

“His computer was looking for material constantly,” Carter told the jury. “Mr Bukovsky said in essence he didn’t see what harm he was doing. He said the children in most of the material looked as if they were enjoying themselves.”

I have an excellent bridge going cheap if anyone at the New York Times is interested.

http://deadline.com/2016/12/game2-winter-rape-murder-russian-reality-series-yevgeny-pyatkovsky-1201871444/

Astonishing activities in the Polish parliament last night.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38347674

The ruling party held the vote on the 2017 budget late at night in a meeting room outside of the main chamber of parliament - the first time that had ever been done. Armed parliament security guards were allegedly asked to keep some opposition MPs and the media out of the hall and the vote was passed on a show of hands. The opposition alleges that people who are not MPs were in the room and were counted as being in favour.

In a separate vote, the number of reporters allowed to cover parliament next year has been severely curtailed.

The attack was a rare instance of an assassination of any Russian envoy. Historians said it might have been the first since Pyotr Voykov, a Soviet ambassador to Poland, was shot to death in Warsaw in 1927.

This is horrific:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/19/russia-irkutsk-surrogate-alcohol-siberia

48 people have died in Irkutsk after drinking a tainted, counterfeit batch of bath tincture. The government introduced a minimum price of 220R for 500ml of vodka (currently about £2.75) and reduced it to 185R last year because so many people were drinking "aftershave" or "bath tincture" instead.

Bath products are still less than half the price so it hasn't really helped much. They're often absolutely sold with the intention of being drunk. I have yet to see a 500ml screw-top bottle of cologne outside of low-end Russian minimarkets.

I have drank some awful blended whiskies in my time, and known some suicidal boozers. But I never met anybody so far gone that they had become inured to the absolute awfulness of casual aftershave drinking.

Grim new chapter in the Petr Pavlensky saga:

https://twitter.com/NataliaAntonova/status/820939051167531008

Interesting stuff being reported about the FSB agents arrested for treason this week. None of it is verified yet but it's plausible.

The theory is that the (arrested) FSB cyber security deputy chief Sergei Mikhailev figured out who was leading the Anonymous-style Russian hacker collective Shaltay Boltay (a journalist called Vladimir Anikeev) and pressured them into targeting particular government figures, culminating in the Surkov email leak. Anikeev was lured back to Russia by the FSB and arrested in October - and is presumed to have ratted out the FSB agents he was working with, including Mikhailev.

There is some background on Shaltay Boltay here:

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2015/02/02/a-man-who-s-seen-society-s-black-underbelly

So that refutes speculation by TPM etc if I'm reading you correctly

If correct, yes. The idea being floated at the moment that the FSB agents were involved in hacking the DNC, etc, wouldn't really square with the allegation that it was the GRU that was leading it anyway.

Over/under odds on a Russian invasion of Belarus?
https://warisboring.com/belarus-prepares-for-hybrid-war-as-europes-last-dictator-knocks-russia-86384fd2a468#.w1swn03dk

This is mostly about a dispute over the price of gas. Russia sells it to Belarus at a heavy discount - which they see as subsidising the Belarussian economy. The decline in the price of gas has hit the revenue Belarus gets for transporting it to Europe, so Belarus increased transport tariffs by 50% - pretty much trying to hardball Russia into cutting the (historically fixed) price of gas Belarus buys for domestic use. They are currently negotiating prices and tariffs in Minsk and the Lukashenko seems to be playing a similar game to Yanukovich in using overtures towards the EU to extract a better deal. I don't think it's anything to be particularly concerned about and the upside is visa free travel to Belarus.

*the Lukashenko camp.

I don't think even Lukashenko refers to himself as "The Lukashenko"

It looks like Navalny has been convicted of embezzlement again so will be barred from running for President. I assume he'll appeal via the ECHR again, though.

Dmitro Firtash is being extradited to the US!

http://news.trust.org/item/20170221133243-grpm3

The first extradition request, on a charge of bribery, was rejected by an Austrian court on the grounds that it was politically motivated, but this has been overturned on appeal.

This could get very interesting. Firtash has alleged ties to politicians all over the world, business people of all shapes and sizes and - allegedly - the capo di tutti capi of the "Russian mafia" Semion Mogilevich.

it kind of was politically motivated, though, right? i mean i have no doubt that he probably did bribe this titanium company or whatever but the timing of the arrest warrant was.. interesting

i met a guy recently who, a few years ago, drove out to broker the sale of a vinyard and it turned out firtash was the buyer. bristling with gun-toting heavies, etc. He found out more about him and decided not to return his calls.