The Russia Report

Issue 84

From the editor: Calexit founder heads home from Russia

Louis Marinelli briefly gained notoriety in 2016 for running the Calexit campaign to make California an independent country while living in Russia. Last month he left Russia, deciding it was too repressive, and is in Turkey waiting for his wife’s immigration papers to be processed so they can move to the United States with their baby. Marinelli, 35, has given up on Calexit but now has a bigger ambition: to break up the US into several countries with a new movement called the Campaign for National Partition.

Louis Marinelli in Russia in January last year

This might sound like a plan that Vladimir Putin would dream up, but Marinelli is adamant that he has never received any direct support from the Kremlin – only bots retweeting his Calexit messages. He told me via Zoom that he was never aware of anyone from the Russian government approaching him. Marinelli moved to Russia in autumn 2016 after separating from his first wife Anastasia, whom he met while studying in the country several years previously. He had been a “Bernie or bust” supporter of Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential nominee, and despises Hillary Clinton. He is a big fan of Donald Trump and recently tweeted support for a Republican candidate for Congress who was endorsed by General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who pled guilty to a felony and is now a QAnon conspiracy theory advocate.

Marinelli met his second wife Diana in Moscow during the pandemic. “I didn’t like the hysteria about the pandemic,” he told me. “She was brave enough to go out – even to defy local ordinances.” They went for walks in parks, sometimes outside the city limits where they were less likely to get stopped by police in case Marinelli didn’t have a QR code giving him permission to leave his home. Diana had one through her job as a sales manager.

Marinelli has not been vaccinated and has had Covid twice. “It wasn’t a pleasant experience,” he says. He experienced flu-like symptoms and on the second occasion lost his sense of smell. But he says that he isn’t an anti-vaxxer and advised his mother to get a booster because she is in a risk group. Marinelli says he doesn’t think he needs a vaccination because he is young and healthy, but if he were to get vaccinated it would be with Sputnik because he doesn’t trust Western pharmaceutical companies. “In Russia I didn’t feel as much like as a target of capitalism,” he says.

“I’m not a big fan of government in general,” Marinelli tells me, which is fairly self-evident, yet it seems paradoxical that he thought he would be happier under the rule of the Kremlin. “The Russian government is not a nanny state,” he continues. “I don’t think government should take care of me and make decisions for me from birth until death.” Marinelli says he went to Russia to get away from politics. The Calexit movement was tiny when he left the US, and he was “overwhelmed” when it got publicity and had to handle 20,000 emails in a week. A separatist movement in the US apparently endorsed by Putin and his bots was obviously controversial when Trump’s ties with Russia were in the headlines every day.

Marinelli now wants his new CNP organisation to push for a peaceful breakup of the country along political lines, so that Republicans could be the majority in some of the smaller countries and Democrats in the others. This could be a way to avert a civil war with neighbours killing each other on the streets, which Marinelli thinks is coming. He has given up on Calexit because he realises that an independent California would be dominated by what he perceives as the “radical left” – people who, for example, accept that gender pronouns can be self-determined.

But Marinelli also sees the contradictions in his position, as illustrated by the Donbass issue, where he recognises both the region’s right to self-determination and also Ukraine’s right to defend its territorial integrity. It sounds like he was frequently conflicted in Russia. He liked that people there don’t rely on the police much (because the police are to be avoided), but later decided the country was becoming a police state. He originally thought Russia was better than the US, where police think “a kid in a hoodie in a white neighbourhood” is a threat. But he witnessed people being detained in Red Square for holding signs about Putin, and was concerned about the use of QR codes, vaccine mandates and ubiquitous facial recognition technology. Then he got drawn into a protest in support of investigative journalist Ivan Golunov, who was arrested on fabricated drugs charges, and was briefly detained himself.

Marinelli needed to make a decision about whether to stay in Russia or move back to the US, and he decided life in the US would be better for himself and his family. He isn’t bothered that some people will accuse him of being backed by the Kremlin, and thinks Americans are largely sick of hearing about Russia ties after the topic became a national obsession in the Trump era. “My political ideology is populism,” Marinelli says. He believes his ideas can be supported by both left and right. He wants to move to a Republican state such as Arkansas where he won’t constantly want to go out and protest. “California’s still a beautiful place. I will still go back as a visitor,” he says. “I’m going to find a job that is meaningful for me. Maybe something like a park ranger. Or in a courthouse. Contribute to my society. And do my political activism to promote the idea of national divorce.”

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Russia steps up demands as Lavrov and Blinken meet

Ahead of a short meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that took place today in Geneva, Russia’s Foreign Ministry demanded that NATO withdraw troops and weapons from Romania and Bulgaria. The two Eastern European countries responded by reiterating that it was their choice to become members of the alliance. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has also said that if NATO will not guarantee that Ukraine won’t join the alliance, the US should promise not to vote for Ukraine’s membership.

Blinken has expressed strong support for Ukraine in the past week, including in tweets reminding Russia that there will be serious consequences in the event of an invasion. “What Russia is doing on Ukraine's borders is even bigger than Ukraine,” he said in one of his tweets. “It is a recipe for conflict, human suffering, and undermining democracy, as other autocratic countries consider similar actions.”

After implying that Russia might get away with a “minor incursion” into Ukraine and receiving a rebuke from Volodymr Zelensky, Joe Biden immediately clarified his comments and said yesterday, “If any, any assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion. Let there be no doubt at all, if Putin makes this choice, Russia will pay a heavy price.” Meanwhile Russia has continued to move more troops and equipment into Belarus and towards Ukraine’s borders.

The UK has expressed strong support for Ukraine and this week flew 2,000 anti-tank missile launchers to the country along with 30 elite troops to train the Ukrainian military. UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace wrote in a new article: “We should all worry because what flows from the pen of President Putin himself is a seven-thousand-word essay that puts ethnonationalism at the heart of his ambitions. Not the narrative now being peddled. Not the straw man of NATO encroachment. It provides the skewed and selective reasoning to justify, at best, the subjugation of Ukraine and at worse the forced unification of that sovereign country.”

A series of hoax bomb threats today across Russia and Ukraine, including at Russia’s Central Bank and in Kyiv and occupied Crimea, may have been an attempt by Russia to place both countries on alert. There have been waves of hoax bomb threats in Russia in previous years that appear to be exercises testing the population.

US sanctions Ukrainians with Kremlin ties

The US Treasury has sanctioned four Ukrainians that it says are engaged in Russian government-directed influence activities to destabilise Ukraine. They are current Ukrainian MPs Taras Kozak and Oleh Voloshyn from the party of Viktor Medvedchuk, who is already sanctioned by the US, and Volodymyr Oliynyk and Vladimir Sivkovich, former Ukrainian officials. Oliynyk now lives in Russia and worked at the direction of the FSB to gather information about Ukrainian critical infrastructure, according to a Treasury statement.

“Kozak, who controls several news channels in Ukraine, supported the FSB’s plan to denigrate senior members of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s inner circle, falsely accusing them of mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, Kozak used his news platforms to amplify false narratives around the 2020 US elections first espoused by US-designated Andrii Leonidovych Derkach,” the statement says.

“Voloshyn has worked with Russian actors to undermine Ukrainian government officials and advocate on behalf of Russia,” it continues. “Voloshyn also worked with US-designated Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian national with ties to Russian intelligence who was sanctioned for attempts to influence the U.S. 2020 presidential election, to coordinate passing on information to influence US elections at the behest of Russia.”

Sivkovich worked with a network of Russian intelligence actors in 2021 to carry out influence operations that attempted to build support for Ukraine to officially give up Crimea to Russia in exchange for a drawdown of Russian-backed forces in Donbass, the statement says. “In early 2020, Sivkovich coordinated with Russian intelligence services to promote Derkach’s disinformation campaign against the US 2020 presidential election. Sivkovich, who has ties to the FSB, also supported an influence operation targeting the United States from 2019 to 2020,” it adds.

Mother of human rights lawyer abducted by Chechen police

The mother of the lawyer for the North Caucasus branch of the Committee Against Torture, Abubakar Yangulbayev, has been abducted by Chechen police who came to Nizhny Novgorod to take them to Chechnya as alleged witnesses in a case. Yangulbayev’s mother Yarema has diabetes and requires insulin five times a day. She reportedly lost consciousness while being detained. A video showed police at Yangulbayev’s parents’ door. His father Saydi is a retired federal judge. Last month Yangulbayev said that 20 of his relatives had been abducted in Chechnya, and he himself was questioned about his criticism of Chechen authorities in a case on “justifying terrorism”.

Tomsk Oblast Jehovah’s Witnesses get prison sentences

A court in Seversk, Tomsk Oblast, has sentenced Jehovah’s Witness Yevgeny Korotun to seven years in prison for his membership of the banned group. Korotun worked at the Siberian Chemical Plant for 15 years before becoming a furniture manufacturer, plasterer and plumber and retiring in April 2020. He and his wife have a young son, and Korotun has an adult daughter from his first marriage. Korotun was arrested in July 2020 after security forces raided his home and has been in a Tomsk jail awaiting trial since September of that year. The same court sentenced Korotun’s acquaintance Alexei Yershov to three years in prison on Wednesday, and another Jehovah’s Witness, Andrei Kolesnichenko, to four years in prison followed by a year of restricted freedom yesterday.

Kirov picketer jailed; Voronezh man dodges extremism charge

A court in Kirov sentenced local activist Vadim Ananin to five days in jail for holding a sign saying “No to repressions and sending troops to Kazakhstan.” Ananin was found guilty of a repeat violation of the rules on protesting. He had participated in a small authorised group picket in support of political prisoners but the court said his sign’s slogan did not fit into the theme of the picket.

Meanwhile a Voronezh court ordered a case against Pavel Sychev for extremism to be dropped in the absence of any law-breaking. Sychev had been accused of displaying the letter “N” in posts on social media, which was assumed to mean support for Alexei Navalny.

Actor dies from post-Covid complications

Film and TV actor Ivan Rudakov has died in Moscow at the age of 43 after contracting Covid last summer and spending time on a ventilator. He was subsequently hospitalised again suffering from problems with his heart and lungs. Russia has seen an upsurge in Covid in the past week to a record 49,513 cases today, but has dropped a plan to introduce nationwide QR code Covid passes from Feb. 1. The Russian government and federal agencies are going to switch to working from home.