The Russia Report
Issue 96
From the editor
Ukrainian chess grandmaster and author Mikhail Golubev, 51, from Odessa, became an activist campaigning against Vladimir Putin during the 2013-14 Maidan revolution. He is a native Russian speaker who is also fluent in English. After being hospitalised with a stroke in 2019 he reduced his workload and political activities, focusing on teaching chess online to pupils all over the world. But since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24 he has been preparing for “any variation” of attacks on his home city, as he told me using chess terminology in a Zoom interview.
Mikhail Golubev (left) in Odessa with fellow volunteer for the war effort Tamaz Kakabadze
Sitting in front of a Ukrainian flag and occasionally vaping, Golubev held up a mug that he had found in a local market. He said there are now lots of patriotic souvenirs on sale, such as T-shirts with pictures of Volodymyr Zelensky on them, but he liked the mug with the famous phrase “Russian warship go fuck yourself” on it and an illustration of the cruiser Moskva which in the past few days has been hit by Ukrainian missiles and has sunk.
The invasion was more of a shock to people in Odessa who still nurtured ties with Russia and hoped for improved relations than for those who had already recognised Putin for what he was, Golubev told me. “I even didn’t expect that so many people would change their opinion,” he said. “There are still die-hard supporters [of Russia], but not many. People I know changed their attitude radically. Some of my relatives said Putin would never attack Kyiv. We are very united and patriotic now. Better late than never.”
Golubev already saw Putin as a dictator when he took control of the independent NTV TV station in 2001. This view was reinforced after investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead on Putin’s birthday in 2006 and the Russian president said, “I think that journalists should know, and experts perfectly understand, that her capacity to influence political life in Russia was extremely insignificant.” Golubev decided then that Russia was a “fascist state,” he said. “It’s subjective indeed but for me personally these awful comments were beyond the red line and clearly indicated that the Russian state had already by then become fundamentally anti-humanistic.”
Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine some people were nostalgic for the Soviet Union; many have relatives in Russia, Golubev said. In 1991 when the USSR collapsed he himself had two great-aunts living in Moscow and it took him some time to accept that Ukraine was an independent country, he said. He accepted it, while others didn’t. “The Soviet Union was a prison, because it was a place you couldn’t leave,” he said. “Only when I was 20 I got a plane ticket to go abroad, to Yugoslavia. They had normal shops, normal cafés. For me it was quite a shocking experience.”
For a chess player the democratic changes were an incredibly good thing, Golubev continued. In the Soviet Union a non-Russian had to be one of the elite such as Vasyl Ivanchuk or Boris Gelfand to play in tournaments abroad. From 1991 Golubev travelled internationally regularly and wrote several chess books in English, as well as articles about chess and politics. He didn’t understand why some people from Odessa, such as journalist Anatoly Wasserman, took Ukrainian passports although they disliked the country. Wasserman explained that he got a passport to fight against Ukraine efficiently. He took Russian citizenship in 2016 and became a Russian MP.
“After Putin came in many people started to destroy Ukraine from the inside,” Golubev said. The mayor of Odessa, Gennady Trukhanov, was seen as pro-Russian and was rumoured to have a Russian passport. That changed in February. “Even the mayor is working on defence. It seems that he was really shocked,” Golubev said. “I knew that [Putin] was capable of doing something like that, so we had to prepare psychologically for an extremely bad scenario.” Odessa has been hit by missiles, but has so far not been devastated like Mariupol or Kharkiv. “We are not afraid to walk in the streets,” Golubev said. “It isn’t rational for a million people to hide from just one missile.”
About half of Golubev’s extended family, including all the children, have left the city. He and his wife Lyuda are staying “as a matter of principle”. Odessa could be faced with an assault from the sea, or from the direction of Mykolaiv in the east, or from the Russian-occupied Transnistria region of Moldova in the west, Golubev said. “For the moment Odessa stands firmly, but long-term, no one knows. No one knows in Kyiv or Moscow or anywhere. It’s hard to predict the situation.” Golubev is grateful for the Western support but wants more heavy weapons. “We are doing better than I could have expected,” he added. “We must be ready at any time to meet more Russian warships with good fire.”
Golubev is disappointed with the silence of most of the world’s top 20 chess players about the war. “In this war it’s really black and white,” he said. “We are attacked by Russia only for the fact of our existence and wish to live democratically. Neutral positions disappoint me almost as much as Karjakin’s position. For me in a way it’s easier to understand Karjakin, who is just a victim of Russian propaganda, than the world’s top players who say nothing. It’s painful how little morality I find in the position of top players.” Former world championship challenger Sergei Karjakin, who is from Crimea, supports Putin. Golubev also believes it is immoral to have former Kremlin official Arkady Dvorkovich as head of FIDE, the world chess federation.
What Putin is doing to Ukraine is “absolutely inhuman and mad,” Golubev said. “His reasons are not rational – so much hate for Ukraine and our democracy, even our weak democracy. For him human life means less than for us. For him it’s important to be in control of us spiritually.” But as the past two months have shown, Putin is less in control of Ukrainians than ever.
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Dozens killed at Kramatorsk station
Last Friday Russia fired two Tochka-U missiles armed with cluster munitions at the train station in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, where people had gathered in an attempt to evacuate the city. One of the missiles had “For the children” written on it, suggesting that the Russians were taking revenge for children they believed to have been killed by Ukraine. The attack killed 57 people, including several children, and injured 109 more. Russia immediately responded by claiming that Ukrainians had fired the missiles themselves. In April 2014 Kramatorsk was seized by Russia-backed militants, and in July of that year Ukrainian troops took back control of it after fierce fighting.
Vladimir Putin insisted during a visit to the Vostochny space centre in Amur Oblast with Alexander Lukashenko on Tuesday that his war in Ukraine was “noble”, and claimed that he had no choice other than to invade. Meanwhile Ukraine captured fugitive Putin associate Viktor Medvedchuk, 67, who was shown in photographs looking gaunt, handcuffed and in camouflage uniform. The wealthy businessman escaped house arrest in Kyiv when the invasion started. His wife Oksana Marchenko made videos appealing to Volodymyr Zelensky and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for his release.
Russia shuts down human rights groups
Russia has revoked the registration of 15 foreign organisations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, without giving a reason. “There is little doubt the move was in response to our reporting on the war in Ukraine,” HRW tweeted. “The Russian government had already made it abundantly clear that it had no use for any facts regarding the protection of civilians in Ukraine. This is just one small further proof of that.”
“We will redouble our efforts to expose Russia’s egregious human rights violations both at home and abroad,” Amnesty’s Secretary General Agnes Callamard said in a statement. “In a country where scores of activists and dissidents have been imprisoned, killed or exiled, where independent media has been smeared, blocked or forced to self-censor, and where civil society organisations have been outlawed or liquidated, you must be doing something right if the Kremlin tries to shut you up.”
Many people arrested for telling truth about war
Hundreds of people across Russia have been arrested in the past few weeks and fined, jailed for a short time or charged with criminal offences for criticising the war in Ukraine, or just writing about what has been happening. They include prominent opposition politicians Vladimir Kara-Murza in Moscow and Lev Shlosberg in Pskov. Kara-Murza has been jailed for 15 days for allegedly disobeying police when they came to detain him. He was previously poisoned twice by the Kremlin. Shlosberg, who was physically assaulted after the 2014 invasion when he spoke out, was detained yesterday together with activist Nikolai Glushkov and accused of “discrediting troops”.
In St. Petersburg activist Alexandra Skochilenko has been jailed ahead of trial on a charge of discrediting troops for replacing price tags in supermarkets with information about atrocities being committed by Russia in Ukraine. Supporters applauded her outside the courtroom and she made a heart sign with her hands while in the defendant’s cage. Skochilenko could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison.
In the Altai Republic the premises of the newspaper Listok were searched and a judge fined the paper 300,000 roubles ($3,660) and its director Olga Komarova 100,000 roubles ($1,220) for discrediting troops, while its publisher Sergei Mikhailov, who belongs to the opposition PARNAS party, was arrested in Moscow and flown back to the region, where he was jailed ahead of trial on a charge of “spreading fakes about the army”. In Abakan, Khakassia, the editor of the publication Novy Fokus, Mikhail Afanasiev, was arrested on the same charge for writing about riot police who refused to fight in Ukraine.
Student journalists sentenced to compulsory work
A court in Moscow has sentenced the four editors of the student news website DOXA to two years of compulsory work after they had spent about a year under house arrest. Armen Aramyan, Alla Gunikova, Natasha Tyshkevich and Vladimir Metelkin were charged with inciting youths to protest because of a video in which they supported freedom of assembly. The editors said that students should not be expelled from university for joining protests in support of Alexei Navalny or expressing their opinions. Tyshkevich was recently also jailed for 15 days for posting a Ukrainian trident on social media in 2017. “Now that our state has launched the so-called ‘special operation,’ … it is now a genuine dictatorship. It is a war criminal,” Aramyan said in court on April 1.
Russian oligarch MP and two staff members indicted in United States
The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has announced that wealthy Russian MP Alexander Babakov and two of his staff members, Alexander Vorobev and Mikhail Plisyuk, have been charged in absentia with conspiring to have a US citizen act as an unregistered agent of the Russian government in the United States. One of their main goals was to get sanctions on Russia over the annexation of Crimea revoked.
The US government says that from January 2012 until at least June 2017 Babakov, Vorobev and Plisyuk “operated an international foreign influence and disinformation network to advance the interests of Russia. The defendants used nonprofit organization based in Russia, the ‘Institute for International Integration Studies,’ as a front for this global foreign influence campaign to advance Russia’s foreign policy objectives… Among other things, the defendants contacted members of the US Congress from 2012 into 2017 to seek meetings and to offer free travel to at least one Congressmember on behalf of BABAKOV, as well as other foreign officials aligned and associated with BABAKOV.”
In March 2017 “the defendants contacted at least one member of the US Congress to offer free travel to a BABAKOV-affiliated conference in Yalta, part of Russia-controlled Crimea, as a service to benefit the purported ‘Prime Minister of Crimea,’ Sergey Aksyonov, who was organizing and attending the conference, and had been sanctioned by the United States Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (‘OFAC’) as a Specially Designated National since 2014 based on his role in actions and policies threatening the sovereignty of Ukraine.” The member of Congress did not accept the offer.