Jul 14: E-Stories
Day 505: A&P Kurmanaev
Catching up…
EA Worldview’s Ukraine Up-date- hop over to Scott’s amazing hourly Ukraine up-date page. I’ll fill in with some bits and bobs.
Stories we’re following…
Chief of the Russian General Staff Army General Valery #Gerasimov reportedly fired Commander of the 58th CAA Major General Ivan Popov after Popov voiced concerns over the need for troop rotations in western Zaporizhzhia amidst Ukrainian counteroffensives. Gerasimov reportedly accused Popov of alarmism and blackmailing the Russian military command. The source added that Gerasimov dismissed Popov and sent him to forward positions after Popov threatened to appeal to Russian President Vladimir Putin with his complaint. These reports, if true, may support ISW’s previous assessments that Russian forces lack operational reserves that would allow them to carry out rotations of personnel defending against UKR counteroffensives and that RU defensive lines may be brittle.
Companies associated with Prigozhin continued to receive multimillion-dollar state orders, despite the military rebellion of their owner. This drew the attention of the publication RTVI. After June 24, the entrepreneur's structures signed nine contracts worth more than 1 billion rubles. The largest of them is a contract with Prodfootservice LLC for more than 705 million rubles. The customer was the Department of Education of the Administration of Mytishchi near Moscow. Prigozhin's company will supply meals to public school students in 2023-2025. Two more suppliers of the organization are AVK LLC, Preschool Nutrition Plant CJSC (KDP) and Russotskapital LLC, which are also associated with the head of the mercenaries.
Russian assets in the G7 countries will be frozen until Moscow pays compensation to Ukraine, the group said in a statement in Vilnius. The G7 includes the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan. The heads of these states also stated the need to create an international mechanism to compensate for damage to Ukraine and expressed their readiness to explore options for its development .
“We reaffirm that, in accordance with our legal systems, Russia’s sovereign assets in our jurisdictions will remain immovable until Russia pays for the damage it has caused Ukraine,” the document emphasizes.
As of June 2023, 58% of Russians said the country was facing "hard times" ahead, a public sentiment poll conducted by the Levada Center showed. Over the year, the share of those who have a negative view of the future jumped by 10 percentage points and reached an all-time record (since 2008). The previous maximum - 56% - was recorded by sociologists in 2009, against the backdrop of the global financial crisis, which brought Russia the strongest economic decline since the 1990s.
Canada allocates $410 million to Ukraine, 'transatlantic security'. At the Vilnius summit on July 12, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced 541 million Canadian dollars ($410 million) in aid to support Ukraine and strengthen transatlantic security.
Polish doctors have begun examining imprisoned former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced on July 12. Morawiecki said at his request a team of Polish doctors began the medical examination. "We do not leave our friends in trouble,” he said without providing details about the examination.
Anatoly Kurmanaev, A police raid raises fears of a clampdown on Russian ultranationalists—NYT
Russian police officers searched a patriotic cultural center on Sunday in a rare move against hard-line supporters of the war in Ukraine that could signal an effort to clamp down on an influential ultranationalist movement following the Wagner mercenary group’s mutiny last month.
The cultural center, Listva, said that dozens of officers, including special forces agents, searched its premises in St. Petersburg on Sunday afternoon, claiming there had been a bomb threat. In a series of social media posts, Listva claimed that the police officers turned off the center’s security cameras, harassed employees and confiscated some items.
A prominent Russian ultranationalist commentator, Igor Girkin, said the raid had been aimed at disrupting a speech he was scheduled to give at the center that day. The speech — on the rebellion led by the Wagner leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a rival of Mr. Girkin’s atop the ultranationalist movement — took place later at another location.
Listva’s founders and other prominent ultranationalists strongly criticized the raid, accusing the government of undermining staunch ideological allies in what they see as Russia’s existential struggle against the West.
“People who read the news of how you are wreaking havoc lose faith in the state,” Dmitri Bastrakov, Listva’s founder, said in a video message, referring to the police search. He recorded the message from what he said was Russian-occupied Ukraine.
In a brief response to questions from The New York Times, Mr. Bastrakov said the police raid would not affect Listva’s work.
After long suppressing fringe ultranationalist groups, the government of President Vladimir V. Putin has allowed them to assume greater prominence after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year. As the war has dragged on, groups such as Listva have often acted in support of Mr. Putin’s efforts to prepare Russian society for a prolonged conflict, stoking hatred for the country’s perceived enemies and defending unpopular policies such as military mobilization.
Inspired by Russia’s countercultural literature of the post-Soviet transition, these groups have seen themselves as the intellectual vanguard of a new Russia created by the war in Ukraine. From its premises in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Listva sold patriotic writings and pro-war paraphernalia, and held readings of nationalist poetry and frontline memoirs.
These organizations collected donations and crowd-funded military and medical supplies for Russian soldiers. Some of their members, such as Mr. Bastrakov and the right-wing author Zakhar Prilepin, served as volunteers in the occupied Donbas region of Ukraine, which these groups consider an integral part of Russia.
Some of these ultranationalist activists have gained prominence since the start of the war as military bloggers, helping to spread far-right views to hundreds of thousands of social media subscribers. Mr. Putin’s frequent meetings with military bloggers in the Kremlin have underlined these activists’ importance in shaping Russian public opinion.
Ultranationalist groups have often been targets since the war in Ukraine began. Over the past year, bombings killed the far-right military blogger known as Vladlen Tatarsky and Daria Dugina, the daughter of an ultranationalist philosopher, and severely injured Mr. Prilepin.
According to Listva, the suspect accused of killing Mr. Tatarsky had gained his trust by attending the center’s events.
But Mr. Putin’s tolerance and sometime support of the ultranationalists have also helped legitimize some of their other views, including antisemitism and white supremacy. This has complicated the Kremlin’s relations with Russia’s ethnic minorities and Central Asian migrant workers, a crucial part of its wartime economy.
The ultranationalists’ calls for intensifying the war against Ukraine have also outstripped Mr. Putin’s more incremental approach to the conflict, opening his government to criticisms of weakness. Commentators such as Mr. Girkin have persistently called for a universal military mobilization, nationalization of the economy and severing of Russia’s remaining ties to the West in order to achieve victory in Ukraine.
These views have been adopted and amplified by Mr. Prigozhin as the mercenary chief built his political platform over the past year. He began sponsoring grass roots ultranationalist groups and, for example, owned Patriot Bar, the St. Petersburg venue where Mr. Tatarsky was killed.
Mr. Prigozhin also partially adapted these groups’ discourse, which blame Russia’s military struggles in Ukraine on a cabal of corrupt traitors inside the government and elite business circles.
To some ultranationalist commentators, the raid on Listva was one of the first political aftershocks of the Wagner group’s rebellion and an attempt by parts of the Russian government to rein in the movement.
“The events in St. Petersburg related to Listva are a clear signal that the night is coming,” an ultranationalist writer Egor Kholmogorov posted on the Telegram app. “It remains to be seen how long and how dark it will be.”