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

Aargh. A Krasnodar couple in their mid-thirties have apparently been arrested for killing and eating dozens of people over the course of twenty years.

The man lost his phone - which someone found and took to the police when they saw it had selfies of him posing with body parts.

Amazing reporting on the battle over a Kazakh oligarch's assets / the spies and counter spies brought in to fight it

https://amp.ft.com/content/1411b1a0-a310-11e7-9e4f-7f5e6a7c98a2

hey shari can you shed more light on the krasnodar killers? my bf does a murder podcast this’d be nice for

(apologies if it’s too soon and thus in bad taste)

Honestly, i don't think a lot more has come out yet, in terms of official statements. The main report was from a Russian site called Mash and most of the Western coverage has been, more or less, a verbatim translation. The only apparently developments are that the woman has been determined to be mentally competent and they have confessed to killing 30 people. The investigators are currently going through their freezer to determine how much of the meat is human.

The local tabloids have suggested that Nataliya had previously been a nurse but had been applying for jobs as a cook at local bistros (thankfully unsuccessfully). The man (Dmitry) is apparently an orphan who was adopted at the age of three - which i imagine will lead to speculation about the link between lack of affection in early years and psychopathy. Again, this is all from the tabloids to take it with a pinch of salt but the adoptive parents apparently had a biological child four years later and paid less attention to Dimitry. His adoptive mother died when he was fifteen and his father kicked him out of the house - around the same time he took up with Nataliya (who would have been in her early twenties). They're both described as heavy drinkers and it's thought that a lot of their victims would have been people they drank with.

What's the podcast btw?

it’s called Bloody Murder, and thanks that’s an effed up sounding story!

Ha I just mentioned this to my podcast friends and one was all "oh yeah I already heard about this" - its all over the news!

I'll definitely give the podcast a listen.

In other true crime news, Newsweek has a report on the Grand Theft Auto killings around Moscow:

http://www.newsweek.com/2017/10/06/death-russia-grand-theft-auto-killers-moscow-notorious-gang-673110.html

They're still a complete mystery - a series of terrorist attacks with no attempt at communicating a public message vs a series of robberies in which nothing was stolen vs something else entirely.

i've been enjoying The Putin Interviews on Showtime. that was cool to see him and Oliver Stone watch "Dr. Strangelove" together in part 2.

afterward Stone gifts the DVD to him but as they are departing Putin turns to the camera to reveal the DVD case was empty and jokes "Typical American gift". lol

Russian opposition figures say Ksenia Sobchak’s presidential bid is a Kremlin-organized sham.

Any thoughts on this 3d chess theory, SV?

I think Sobchak is probably entirely sincere and is an 'opposition figure' of sorts but it plays into the Kremlin's hands. She generally appears out of her depth in political interviews and represents everything the bulk of the country tends to resent about 'liberal' figures - ultra-rich jet-setting Muscovite, links to the corruption and chaos of the 90s, perception of snobbery, etc. The reason Navalny has been relatively successful is that he represents, for better or for worse, a break from that.

The nature of the presidential election process means that left-field candidates pretty much need the support of established political infrastructure to generate the 300,000 signatures required to be in the running and there's a strong suspicion that United Russia will help Sobchak along with that. I don't think it's a fix, as such, but it couldn't really be much better for Putin if it was.

Thanks. Could fathom why they offed Navalny like they did for obvious reasons, I cannot imagine they see Sobchak as a threat, and if anything, could (ab)use her to show they do allow opponents, they are a democracy etc. Especially in the light of the recent Navalny trial condemnations from the EU. Sobchak could be a perfect "See? She's running and we're not stopping here innit? Nothing to see here" candidate that will never amass an amount of votes that would mean something.

She is following a pretty familiar path - it was Prokhorov last time.

It’s a shame as the grass roots liberal / centre left parties made a pretty good showing at the local elections (albeit mostly in Moscow and on a tiny turnout) by engaging with communities, using the internet to ensure that voters were aware of issues and who their candidates were, etc. There was a sense that, at least to some degree, they were figuring out some quasi-effective strategies, as limited as their reach may have been. Sobchak tanks that by having no platform and offering no reason to vote for her other than as a vote against *whoever it may be* that is backed by United Russia.

I can understand why people are suspicious but never underestimate the egotism and general cluelessness of the kind of ‘liberal’ figures with the money and standing to make a challenge at the moment.

nuclear accident in September?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-nuclearpower-accident/french-institute-suspects-nuclear-accident-in-russia-or-kazakhstan-in-september-idUSKBN1D92LJ

This is an obvious, blatant attack on the freedom of the press in the US.

Of course the US government is not forcing state media outlets from allied countries to register as foreign agents.

This is a dangerous precedent meant to silent critical media. https://t.co/ot9wBB5oRs

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 9, 2017

The implications for RT are probably quite minimal in reality - they can play the victim in the short term and possibly win a humiliating court case in the longer term.

The real impact is the 99.5% probably that Russia is going to extend its own foreign agent laws to the international media in retaliation - which is likely to mean RFE/RL, Radio Svoboda, etc journalists kicked out of the country or, at the very least, under pressure to disclose every contact they make to the government under pain of arrest.

It’s a terrible move for the US to make and will end up hitting state-funded American reporters hardest.

Xps,

Looks like there might have been a leak near the Mayak processing plant in September:

https://www.rferl.org/amp/report-russia-confirms-radioactivty-ruthenium-106-emanating-southeastern-urals/28865773.html

Some context on Mayak from a while back.

https://apnews.com/ba820f02074247fc8486b63b7c87d6cb/russias-nuclear-nightmare-flows-down-radioactive-river

Ozyorsk is still a ‘closed town’.

thanks

Poroshenko had Saakashvili arrested today. Misha’s supporters busted him out of the police van and whisked him off. No border can stop him, no jail can hold him.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gSdb2c0Eve4

Well, a prison probably could but not a two-door Ford transit, certainly.

In another bizarre twist, Jane Collins of UKIP - an MEP last seen getting rinsed for £358k in libel damages she claims not to be able to pay (having defamed a number of people wrt the Rochdale grooming saga) - has just turned up in Kyiv to defend Misha.

http://www.eurointegration.com.ua/news/2017/12/5/7074665/

Saakashvili is safely in jail, having been arrested by armed police at his home, and is now on hunger strike.

The Prosecutor General, Yuri Lutsenko, has said the Ukrainian authorities have taped evidence of him accepting money from ‘criminal gangs linked to Yanukovich’, which Misha says has been fabricated.

The nature of Ukrainian domestic politics means there is a reasonable chance it is true - but ‘criminal gangs’ and ‘linked to Yanukovich’ have extremely elastic meanings. Odessa, where he was governor, has a large and sophisticated organised crime network linked to the ports and Saakashvili was often rumoured to be working with them.

However, the shakeup of oligarchs, many linked to crime networks, has left former Yanukovich associates like Rinat Akhmetov closely allied with either Poroshenko or his rival Yatseniuk.

Nobody is innocent and picking on Saakashvili, who has about 3% support for his party nationally, looks like weakness. idk how much trouble his anti-corruption campaign was likely to cause but a high-profile ‘political prisoner’ with good ties to the US is the last thing a leader still needing massive financial and political support from the international community should be looking to get.

This is going on in the background:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/12/07/its-time-for-the-west-to-get-tough-on-ukraine/?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.71994705e8db&__twitter_impression=true

"He is a super president and a super leader" - New "SuperPutin" exhibition opens in Moscow with the Russian leader portrayed in various heroic roles; from riding a bear to firing missiles in the colours of the Russian flag pic.twitter.com/LxQ9WZOxfD

— AFP news agency (@AFP) December 10, 2017

it is pretty awesome living in the year 250 BC

For context, this ‘museum’ seems to be a rental space in an arts complex on the outskirts of town and opened in November. The ticket price (higher than the Pushkin and the Tretyakov put together) suggests they don’t expect many visitors and it is more of a publicity stunt on the part of the gallerist or, like most of the Putin tat in Moscow, aimed at the irony tourism market, than much else.

fwiw, the Kremlin seems a bit rattled this election cycle - not really because there is an expectation people will rush out to vote for Zhirinovsky, Sobchak or (given the chance) Navalny but because there is a very strong chance of a low turnout. Some of the Navalny messaging around corruption has hurt Medvedev and, by association, the whole Putin cadre and there isn’t really a sense of much natural excitement about the prospect of an extended Putin run. His approval numbers will stay high unless something extraordinary happens but the percentage of people going out to vote will probably diminish. There are plans to basically turn the day of the election into a big national holiday with civic events and funfairs or w/e to try to get people out of the house.

Oddly, the LDPR seems to have spent a hell of a lot of money on advertising recently. They’re everywhere. I’m not sure where they get the cash from. One theory might be that they are being boosted to give people the impression that they need to go out and vote for United Russia to stop them but idk.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2017/12/21/russian-lawmakers-want-to-make-it-possible-to-blacklist-individual-people-literally-anybody-with-internet-access-as-foreign-agent-mass-media-outlets

Good piece on how, as everyone predicted, elements within the Duma want to use the Foreign Agent designation of RT in the US to justify a wave of new regulations against everyone from major news outlets to individual bloggers who take money from abroad.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/20/politics/us-ukraine-weapons-export/index.html

The US has lifted Obama’s ban on selling small arms to Ukraine. This is not particularly huge in itself (Ukraine is a net exporter of small arms) but is seen as a potential precursor to what they are really after, which is a bunch of free anti-tank missiles.

https://www.ft.com/content/4bc2f436-e5d9-11e7-8b99-0191e45377ec

The English High Court has just frozen the assets of one of Ukraine’s biggest oligarch / power-broker / media magnates - Ihor Kolomoisky - after he was accused of stealing $2bn from a bank he owned. He flits between different factions, and has his own political party, but is currently aligned with Poroshenko’s main rival Yatsenyuk iirc.

He was caught meeting with Ukraine’s Prosecutor General (or rather the PG was caught meeting with him) in Amsterdam last week - something they both tried to pass off as two tourists bumping into each other. It’s strongly suspected the PG is helping him evade domestic charges related to the (now state owned) bank.

something they both tried to pass off as two tourists bumping into each other

Lol this feels like at some point it will be Trump's endgame if his frequent (secret) meetings with Russians come up

It's a bit of a classic is that one!

BREAKING: US officials: Trump administration approves plan to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine, including anti-tank missiles.

— The Associated Press (@AP) December 23, 2017

This is not good.

Pee-tape in 3, 2, 1...

They’ve also banned Kadyrov from Instagram under the terms of the new sanctions, perhaps the most damaging blow yet.

Yeah, no more pee-tape screenshots. Those devious bastards!

Russian submarines are prowling around vital undersea cables. It’s making NATO nervous.

Feel like I've read this ^^ story multiple times since 2014. Has anything changed this year?

The Soviets/Russians would be remiss to not already have means of severing critical undersea cables in the case of conflict. There are plenty of places, particularly southwest of Ireland, where the seabed is shallow enough to permit emplacement of explosives in the muck below the cables, without assistance. They could also just be splicing into the cables, as the U.S. has long done in Russian Baltic/White Sea/Caspian Sea cables.

Starting in 90s, NSA used underwater drones, delivered by submarine, to tap undersea cables. https://t.co/mkqjW4pT8Q pic.twitter.com/ASfgshBEuX

— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) March 31, 2016

^ without assistance from surface ships

The chairman of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, has claimed that banning Kadyrov from Instagram violates international law and has demanded a symmetrical response. All the Chechen parliament have deleted their accounts in solidarity. It’s popping off.

Seems like every time I'm glancing at non-collusion related russian news, it's Navalny getting arrested again.

Leonid Ragozin at Bloomberg is worth following for sympathetic coverage of Navalny:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-26/navalny-s-followers-see-putin-s-weakness-in-russia-s-heartland

Though, as suggested elsewhere, disaffection is more likely to lead to people not engaging with politics / bothering to vote than a groundswell of opinion in favour of Navalny.

The US has just published a list of ‘Kremlin-linked oligarchs’ ahead of potential future individual sanctions and they have literally just copied and pasted from a Forbes article about the 96 richest people people in Russia. This was supposed to have taken the State Department six months:

So the 96 “oligarch” names on the US Treasury list correspond EXACTLY to the 96 billionaires on this Forbes list of the Russian rich. https://t.co/VtjUJHXpro

— Tom Parfitt (@parfitt_tom) January 30, 2018

The list includes at least two people who have claimed their businesses have been expropriated by the state.

Vladimir Putin earned 38.5 million rubles (roughly $673,000) between 2011 and 2016, according to information publicly released by the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation on Tuesday, giving the Russian president an average yearly salary of about $112,000.

The president also listed a number of assets on his forms, including 13 bank accounts with a combined balance of 13.8 million rubles ($241,000), a roughly 800-square-foot apartment in St. Petersburg, 230 shares in Bank Saint Petersburg and two Soviet-made sports cars — Volgas made in 1960 and 1965 — and a 2009 Lada 4x4.

Putin was required to give details of his income and assets as part of his registration for the upcoming presidential election, due to be held March 18. Putin completed his registration Tuesday, according to reports in Russian state media.

lol

Wow this was sloppy wetwork:

Britain Threatens Retaliation Against Kremlin After Russian Spy Collapse: Fears of an assassination attempt on ex Russian agent Sergei Skripal with a toxic substance deepened when it emerged that emergency workers were hospitalized after treating him.

There's a suggestion that more details, including the nature of the substance they encountered, are going to be released this afternoon. There were rumours in the press it was Fentanyl - though nothing official yet.

It's an odd one if it was a state-backed assassination attempt - i think it would be the first time Russia had tried to knock off anyone involved in a spy exchange. There'd be little point in good-faith trading of spies if they're just going to get killed.

The witness statement is very British:

“There was some blonde bird laying on an old man's shoulder doing this hand thing in the air,”

How would Fentanyl have put first responders in the hospital? Unless those were bogus reports. Which I could easily believe.

They could be exaggerated reports but you can apparently turn something very similar to Fentanyl into an aerosol / gas.

Is fentanyl soluble in dimethyl sulfoxide? One can get just about anything through the skin in DMSO solution, indeed, you can rub it on your skin and taste the garlicy sulfur note in a few seconds. In the 60s there were plans to wipe doorknobs at Republican conventions with LSD/DMSO solutions, for laffs.

So, a passerby walks close to Skripal and daughter with a pump bottle, sprays them in their faces, and first responders unaware that DMSO will also slip right through latex gloves also get a dose.

Or they didn't put on gloves, given no blood was visible.