The Russia Report

Issue 182

From the editor

Journalist Yekaterina Duntsova continues to enliven the show that is Vladimir Putin’s staged re-election campaign, insisting that she will pursue her rival anti-war candidacy “to the end”, although it is a frightening prospect. On Wednesday she submitted registration forms to the Central Electoral Commission in Moscow, having been nominated at a gathering on Sunday where there was a mysterious power outage and police also arrived to survey the scene. Human rights activist Olga Suvorova was detained at Krasnoyarsk airport on her return from the nomination meeting.

Yekaterina Duntsova spoke about the war in Ukraine in her campaign video

Duntsova, 40, still faces many hurdles if the Kremlin is to allow her on the ballot, and any reason can easily be found to prevent this. Alternatively she might serve as a useful token opposition candidate who will bolster Putin’s claims to be in a competitive election, while standing no chance of success. She will need to gather 300,000 signatures from at least 40 regions of Russia to become a candidate, and the electoral commission can reject any number of signatures, claiming they are fake, as has happened in past local elections. Meanwhile Duntsova could also be arrested for speaking out against the war on a charge of “discrediting the armed forces” or “spreading fakes”.

Six years ago, in a time when the Kremlin was marginally less ruthless than it is today, Alexei Navalny said he would run against Putin and held rallies in cities all over Russia where he debated issues with members of the audience. But the electoral commission refused to register him as a candidate because he had a criminal conviction, which itself was on a charge fabricated by the authorities. Since then Navalny has not only been poisoned and given multiple prison sentences, but is now missing, possibly being slowly transferred to a remote location. Duntsova can hardly hope for a more promising fate.

In a campaign video Duntsova recounts how she was elected to the Rzhev city council in 2019 and found out that there was no money or power in the regions and everything was decided a long way away. “No one asked us, what do you want?” she says. “In February 2022 the current president announced the start of the Special Military Operation,” she continues. “And now every day people are killed. I’m certain they wanted to live. We all want to live and we need peace. Living in peace means respecting and loving each other regardless of our religious, cultural and political differences. We need to relearn how to talk to each other and solve our country’s problems together.”

Putin of course has other ideas, and his style was aptly illustrated at the United Russia convention hosted by Dmitri Medvedev where he was unanimously nominated as a candidate. The tame Communist Party and LDPR have not even put up their fake opposition candidates yet, and long-serving Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov demonstrated his sentiments yesterday when he paid tribute to Stalin in Red Square to commemorate the dictator’s birth, praising him for creating the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal “that protects us today”.

We are all looking for signs that something could eventually change for the better in Russia, and Yekaterina Duntsova is the latest person to suggest that this is possible. But inevitably the country always stagnates or goes backwards. Millions more people need to find the right path out of the darkness, and there are no signs that this is going to happen before the election in less than three months’ time.

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Two former US Marines killed fighting for Ukraine

Former US Marine Graham Dale has been killed fighting for Ukraine during an attempt to save a position that was surrounded by Russian troops. “Instead of retreating or hiding, he ran into combat,” a fellow American in Ukraine Ryan O’Leary said. “Dale killed multiple enemy soldiers before being wounded. The enemy assault was stopped due to his actions and those of the Ukrainians with him which prevented the line from collapsing.”

After being wounded Dale tried to get back under cover but was hit again when a Russian drone dropped munitions. He was a dual Irish-American citizen who had moved from Dublin to Texas in 2000. He joined the Marines after the 9/11 attacks and served until 2008, including in Iraq.

Another former US Marine, 21-year-old Ethan Hertwick from Springfield, Missouri, has also been killed while reportedly fighting heroically. He and another member of his unit “both single-handedly left their post taking out about 12 enemy soldiers and halting their advance,” Hertwick’s mother Leslie said. “They saved two bunkers full of their unit. Ethan made it to the bunker but had to go back for his mate, and that is when he was hit in his left upper chest above his plate, but he still tried to render aid before he passed.”

Ex-FBI agent sentenced for helping Russian oligarch

Former top FBI agent Charles McGonigal, 55, has been sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to a count of conspiring to launder money. McGonigal was the special agent in charge of the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York before retiring in 2018, and was responsible for investigating Russian oligarchs. Prosecutors said he and former Russian diplomat Sergei Shestakov tried to get sanctions removed from billionaire Oleg Deripaska and agreed to investigate a rival oligarch, Vladimir Potanin. They allegedly used shell companies to receive payments from Deripaska. McGonigal said he was deeply remorseful for his actions.

Three sentenced for opposition to Kremlin, writer Akunin designated as terrorist

A military court in Yekaterinburg has sentenced Nikolai Yuriev from the closed town of Novouralsk, Sverdlovsk Oblast, to 18 years in prison on terrorism charges for an attempt to set fire to a local military recruiting office. Yuriev is one of a number of Russians who have declared themselves to be “citizens of the USSR”. He was arrested on Feb. 5 and accused of having the ultimate goal of seizing power in several cities and “overthrowing the constitutional order”.

A court in Ufa has sentenced environmental activist Ramilya Saitova to five years in prison on a charge of “public calls for activity aimed against the security of the state” for a video in which she called on mobilised men not to kill in Ukraine but to go home. She was arrested in May this year. In addition to her protests in the defence of an area of natural beauty Saitova had proclaimed herself the “acting head of the government of Bashkortostan” in a video for which in November 2021 she was sentenced to three years in prison for calling for the removal of Orthodox crosses from the Urals region and the deportation of the Armenian diaspora there. She was released in August 2022.

A court in Moscow has sentenced “Left Resistance” activist Alena Krylova to two years in prison for “extremism” after she was extradited back to Russia from Bishkek. Krylova had tried to claim asylum in Kyrgyzstan. Another member of the group, Darya Polyudova, who had supported Ukraine for years, was sentenced to nine years in prison last December.

Russia has also this week added bestselling author Boris Akunin (pen name of Grigori Chkhartishvili) to its list of terrorists and extremists and authorities have raided his publishing company, since any sales of his books will now be considered to be “financing of terrorism”. Akunin has lived outside Russia, including in the UK, since 2014. He criticised the annexation of Crimea and most recently expressed support for Ukraine while talking to pro-Kremlin hoax callers Vovan and Lexus.