The Real Russia. Today.
Meduza has a new quiz about Russia and the USA, Putin praises the GRU, and America says its cyber-defense could go on the offensive
Friday, November 2, 2018
This day in history. On November 2, 1962, John F. Kennedy announced in a national address that the USSR had begun dismantling its missile bases on Cuba.
- Who's got more? It's Russia vs. America, baby. (It's a quiz.)
- Russia arrests another treason suspect, this time an expert on private military companies
- Moscow police arrest a teen suspected of plotting another anarchist bombing
- Putin showers Russia's military spy agency in praise, celebrates its ‘unique capabilities’ on 100th anniversary
- Someone spammed a Novosibirsk City Hall forum, lobbying hard for a Stalin monument
- Columnist Oleg Kashin thinks the Ingush-Chechen conflict could get a lot worse
- The U.S. military is threatening a counter-cyber-attack, if Russia ups its election meddling next week
It's Friday. Take a load off, and take our latest quiz. 👨🏫
Lately, Americans can't shut up about “Russian hackers and trolls.” In Russia, meanwhile, they can't stop moaning about U.S. sanctions, dirty dirty dollar bills, and even American oil. In all this bickering and competition, do you know which country has more of what? This quiz is designed to gauge your grasp of the standoff that is [don't call it the New Cold War].
- Take Meduza's new quiz here.
He says he's no traitor ⚖️
On November 2, a Moscow court reportedly locked up a military expert named Vladimir Neelov on treason charges. According to the news agency TASS, he works at the Center for Strategic Trend Studies, focusing on private military companies.
Neelov has provided comments to the Federal News Agency and other pro-Kremlin media outlets, and he apparently lives in St. Petersburg, according to his Facebook page.
A source familiar with Neelov’s interrogation told Interfax that he maintains his innocence and expressed confusion about why he is being charged with treason.
Another anarchist teen bomber? 💣
Law enforcement reportedly detained a 16-year-old boy in Moscow on Friday on charges of making a bomb. The news agency TASS says police found an explosive device and other bomb components at the suspect’s home during a search.
Sources close to the investigation say the boy was in contact with the 17-year-old anarchist suicide bomber who killed himself and injured three officers in an attack on the FSB building in Arkhangelsk earlier in the week. The tabloid REN TV says the Moscow suspect is a fellow anarchist.
Putin doubles down on the GRU 🕵️
Vladimir Putin gave a speech on Friday at an event honoring the 100th anniversary of Russia’s “legendary Main Intelligence Directorate” — the same organization that has humiliated Moscow internationally over the past several months, as evidence accumulates that this spy agency is responsible for the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, England, and numerous hacking efforts targeting Western institutions.
Russian news organizations drew attention to the president’s promise to restore the directorate’s old name and initialism (GRU), but Putin’s very attendance and words of support are likely even more significant. “As supreme commander-in-chief, I certainly know your [...] unique capabilities,” Putin said, celebrating the GRU’s “special operations” and “high-quality intelligence and analysis.”
Spamming for Stalin 📧
From October 9 to 29, Internet users in Novosibirsk were invited to share their thoughts about a proposal to build a monument in the city to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. In three weeks, 243 comments rolled in.
According to a report by the mayor’s office about the feedback, the city got 85 responses against the monument and 155 comments in support of a Stalin monument, including 137 posts advocating that the new monument be erected near the city’s historic Officers’ Building.
Curiously, the report notes, 97 of these 137 comments were completely identical.
The issue now goes to Novosibirsk’s Art Council, which has to decide what to do with the online experiment’s apparently unreliable results.
Kashin on the Ingush-Chechen unrest ✊
In an op-ed for Republic, columnist Oleg Kashin does his usual thing and speculates widely and wildly, this time about the possible significance and fallout of the border dispute between Ingush protesters and the leaders of Chechnya and Ingushetia. Kashin paints a particularly unflattering portrait of the latter, Yunus-bek Yevkurov, arguing that a recent attempt by a Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter to make him seem sympathetic (by mentioning his head cold) only further highlighted the politician’s alienation at home (he probably caught the cold when he ran back to Moscow for marching orders).
Kashin guesses that the border dispute (which he believes is really about money, or police power, or maybe even local regime change) could spiral into a conflict ranging from Moscow’s bungled meddling in Tatarstan to another shooting war not unlike the violence in eastern Ukraine or Karabakh. Either way, Kashin says, Moscow has screwed up again, and we’re left wondering (yet again) whether it was incompetence (probably) or treason (probably not, but oh how much more interesting).
Kashin concludes with the following thought: maybe the whole misguided Ingush-Chechen border agreement is part of the Kremlin revisiting its approach to nationality, and the Putin administration is returning to a Russia built on inter-ethnic cooperation, rather than a single civic Russian identity.
Watch your electronic back, Russia 👊
“The U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon have quietly agreed on the outlines of an offensive cyber attack that the United States would unleash if Russia electronically interferes with the 2018 midterm election on November 6,” current and former senior U.S. officials familiar with the plan told The Center for Public Integrity. What would these counter-cyber-attacks look like? The Americans aren’t saying, but apparently “the trigger for a broader response would have to be something more than ‘malign influence.’”
In other words, we’re talking about tampering with voting registration and vote counts. The green light for offensive cyber attacks means the U.S. military is now willing to compromise its access to resources useful for collecting information, for the sake of counter-striking hostile cyber-threats. Read the story here at The Center for Public Integrity.
Yours, Meduza