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

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.

Sure, it was almost certainly done at the request of the Ukrainian government as part of a clan vs clan power struggle. He's likely to be guilty though. It'll be interesting to see how hard the Trump administration wants to push him.

ok what's going on now

Jehovah's Witnesses ban?

loads of ropey oligarchs making discreet Trump donations via limited liability companies?

brave britain making a stand against russian menace by escalating baltic situation it seems

SV will this end in war pls tell us

The last time we were fixing for war in Europe the Jehovah's Witnesses were getting banged up in the German KL system, so maybe Russia planning to ban them for their apolitical peacenik tendencies is a bad omen.

Never say never but there is no realistic prospect of war. There is no incentive for Russia to invade Estonia, no particular separatist sentiment and nothing much for British soldiers to do.

what the hell are we playing at then

NATO being NATO. "Showing commitment " to the Baltic states and giving soldiers something to do.

shouldn't they be peacekeeping and feeding the starving in somalia or something

here, let me have control of the armed forces

It is unusual that the UK is less than half the population of the Russian Federation and our population has grown by about 3 million more than theirs since the cold war era. If we could just knock a decade or so off avg life expectancy the housing/social care problems would be slightly improved - I'm doing my bit for that cause!

This dude has just been shot dead at a hotel in Kyiv:

http://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-voronenkov-maksakova/28313807.html

This is nuts.

"Thank god! They should have shot him for treason long ago," says Voronenkov's mother-in-law

Ice cold.

http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-soviet-nkvd-greatgranddaughter-seeks-painful-truth/28382571.html

I like the karmic balance of that Great Terror story linked on the same page, the overenthusiastic NKVD officer who makes the mistake of trying to implicate Stalin's fave writer in some bogus Cossack intrigue and ends up getting shot for "violating socialist legality".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/gunman-in-ukraine-kills-putin-foe-in-attack-denounced-as-state-terrorism/2017/03/23/72ddd20e-0fc7-11e7-ab07-07d9f521f6b5_story.html

Washington Post interviewed Voronenkov Tuesday night:

“For our personal safety, we can’t let them know where we are,” he said toward the end of the hour-long interview. “It’s a totally amoral system and in its anger it may go to extreme measures. There’s been a demonization of us. It’s hard to say what will happen.

“The system has lost its mind,” he added. “They say we are traitors in Russia. And I say, ‘Who did we betray?’ I gave testimony against the citizen of another country who was president, who fled his country, created a bloodbath, betrayed his country.”

As he left the interview, he added: “It’s hard to imagine we will be forgiven.”

The guy who shot him died a couple of hours ago in hospital. It's rumoured that he's an ex Ukrainian National Guard soldier but that wouldn't tell us anything, if true. Hired killers often have a service background.

Died from what?

He was shot by Voronenkov's bodyguard during the attack.

What happened to the bodyguard?

He is fine, apparently. Was wounded but only lightly.

Seems more or less confirmed that the killer was ex-Ukrainian army now. The Kyiv police chief says they are working under the assumption it was a contract killing.

Separately, this is interesting:

http://www.rferl.org/a/former-ukraine-finance-minister-jaresko-to-manage-puerto-rico-financial-crisis/28387912.html

Natalie Jaresko, the former Ukrainian finance minister has been appointed by the US to overhaul Puerto Rico's budget. Expect lots of privatisation and cuts to services / pensions.

Local media and the nationalist MP Oleh Lyashko are claiming the killer was a member of the far-right / ultranationalist Azov battalion but again that doesn't shed much light on whether there was a nationalist motive, he was a hired gun or, as the eccentric Interior Minister claims, he was a Russian government plant in the Ukrainian militia. Hired gun is substantially more likely than anything else.

The big news over the last few days has been the Navalny protests centred around Medvedev. The numbers are still low - 10k-15k in Moscow - but for the first time they have been coordinated across the country in places as diverse as Tomsk and Makhachkala, adding up to an estimated 60k people nationwide. There is a profile of him here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-28/inside-alexei-navalny-s-long-shot-bid-to-beat-putin

He is still probably barred from standing for election but there is speculation that this might be reversed and that it could be better for him to stand and be defeated.

With perfect timing, Nadia Savchenko has given a pretty good reminder of why pinning your political hopes on unpredictable nationalists to fight oligarchy might not be the best idea. She is the Ukrainian pilot who was jailed in Russia, released to a hero's welcome, courted by politicians and hyped as a potential president by the western press.

In a phone-in, she agreed with a caller who claimed Ukraine was under 'the Jewish yoke' and she used it as a springboard for an antisemitic rant about how Jews have 80% of the power in Ukraine and she "doesn't like yids". This will hopefully be the end of the puff pieces about her but it's another depressing reminder that there are no easy saviours waiting in the wings.

Jesus that's messed up.

At least 10 people killed in two separate bomb attacks on the St Petersburg metro.

Reports that it could be three.

Seeing just one now.

Yes, there has been discussion of two devices that didn't explode but i think some of the confusion was initially caused by the practice of interchange stations having two names.

Poot is in StP to give a speech

That's an interesting choice to replace Scott Weiland.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/86/The_Wire_Poot.jpg
http://www.kshe95.com/sites/g/files/exi371/f/styles/large_730/public/article-images-featured/773541-386141.jpg?itok=NjWg4Rly

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/world/europe/chechen-authorities-arresting-and-killing-gay-men-russian-paper-says.html?_r=0

By ANDREW E. KRAMER
APRIL 1, 2017
MOSCOW — First, two television reporters vanished. Then a waiter went missing. Over the past week, men ranging in age from 16 to 50 have disappeared from the streets of Chechnya.

On Saturday, a leading Russian opposition newspaper confirmed a story already circulating among human rights activists: The Chechen authorities were arresting and killing gay men.

While abuses by security services in the region, where Russia fought a two-decade war against Islamic insurgents, have long been a stain on President Vladimir V. Putin’s human rights record, gay people had not previously been targeted on a wide scale.

The men were detained “in connection with their nontraditional sexual orientation, or suspicion of such,” the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, reported, citing Russian federal law enforcement officials, who blamed the local authorities.

By Saturday, the paper reported, and an analyst of the region with her own sources confirmed, that more than 100 gay men had been detained. The newspaper had the names of three murder victims, and suspected many others had died in extrajudicial killings.

A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, denied the report in a statement to Interfax on Saturday, calling the article “absolute lies and disinformation.”

“You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” the spokesman, Alvi Karimov, told the news agency.

“If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” Mr. Karimov said.

Yeah this is a horrible situation. Even if the details aren't entirely clear, dozens of people definitely seem to have been arrested despite no legal grounds for doing so and there are credible reports of assault/ torture, at the least, which reinforce the idea that Chechnya is a law unto itself.

The spokesman's quote is one of the most chilling things I've ever heard.

It is such a brazen admission of murderous intent, it seems quite shocking even by Kadyrov regime standards.