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#AceNewsRoom With ‘Kindness & Wisdom’ Mar.31, 2022 @acebreakingnews

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The Real Russia. Today. How the FSB feeds war content to Russia’s news media: Published: Wednesday, March 30, 2022

What you’ll find in today’s newsletter

• Latest developments
• Russian soldiers refuse to join the invasion
• The FSB’s media meddling on the refugee narrative
• Belarusians who have been forced to flee, again
• What happened to Roman Abramovich?
• Expert analysis: historian Andrey Zorin on the Putin regime’s guiding mythology, lawyer Pavel Ivlev explains sanctions lobbying in America, journalist Dmitry Kolezev says a crackdown is coming to Russia’s elites, Dmitri Trenin explains Russia’s grand pivot from the West, and Fyodor Lukyanov says Washington still fears China more

Latest major developments in Russia and Ukraine

• 🧑‍🏫 Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone: Education officials in St. Petersburg have instructed schools and universities to conduct a “unified lesson” on April 19 to teach students about Nazis and their modern-day “accomplices” throughout the West. Students are supposed to write about it afterward on social media. The lessons are intended for students ages 12 and older. Officials are reportedly working with two “patriotic” groups to put together the lecture.
• 🛃 Hot air for a cool breeze: Ukraine is reportedly urging Poland and the Baltic states to close their borders with Russia and Belarus, hoping to block all deliveries through those countries into the Union State.
• 📉 They’re giving none away: Advertising spending in Russia will plunge this year, research firm Insider Intelligence Inc. said in a new forecast. Ad spending in Russia is expected to total $3.55 billion in 2022, down 49.7 percent from last year, the company told The Wall Street Journal. The decline is due largely to Russia’s economic slowdown and Western businesses fleeing amid the invasion of Ukraine.
• 🏖️ And when at last the work is done: Everyone but a skeleton crew posting breaking news updates at the business news publication RBC is reportedly being sent on a two-week holiday. Sources told Meduza that the break could last even longer, as the news outlet apparently hopes to wait out the war to avoid a crackdown by the state authorities. RBC editor-in-chief Petr Kanaev denies the rumors of mass work stoppages but says he did encourage editors to make vacation time available to staff not reporting on Ukraine.

🪖 ‘Refusing to kill people isn’t a crime’: The Russian National Guard is firing officers who refuse to join the war in Ukraine (5-min read)

On March 24, Pavel Chikov, a lawyer from the international human rights organization Agora, reported that 12 Russian National Guard officers from Krasnodar who were participating in military exercises in Crimea had refused to follow their commander’s orders to join the war in Ukraine. The officers were subsequently fired, though they’ve challenged the decision in court and are seeking to have their employment reinstated. Meduza spoke with Krasnodar-based lawyer Mikhail Benyash, who’s representing the officers in court, about the case and its possible consequences.

🕵️ Russian state news aired a refugee’s testimony about ‘atrocities’ committed by Ukraine’s Azov battalion. The video came from the FSB. (4-min read)

A video making the rounds on Russian state media of a refugee from Mariupol recounting the alleged “crimes” of soldiers from Ukraine’s ultranationalist Azov regiment was distributed by the FSB’s Public Relations Center. This was reported to Mediazona by two sources who received the press release. According to screenshots of the e-mail one of the sources provided to Mediazona, the FSB’s press service ordered media outlets not reveal the source of the information.

🧳 Thousands of Belarusians moved to Ukraine after the 2020 protests. Now, many are being forced to move again.(24-min read)

After the 2020 protests in Belarus, hundreds of thousands of people fled the country. Some moved to Europe, but many chose Ukraine as their new democratic home. Now, with war on their doorstep, they’re being forced to choose between hiding, fighting against Russia, and fleeing even further into Europe. They told their stories to Meduza.

☠️ Everything we know about the alleged poisoning on March 3 (three-min read)

Three people who took part in talks between Russia and Ukraine early this month experienced symptoms consistent with those of chemical weapons poisoning, reported Bellingcat on March 28. According to the investigative outlet, one of the people affected was businessman Roman Abramovich. Here’s what we know from Bellingcat, the BBC, and The Wall Street Journal.

Expert analysis

🧠 Russia’s current leadership gets its ideas from the USSR’s ‘stagnation’ heyday

Historian Andrey Zorin told Meduza that the mythology and ideology that guide Russia’s leaders imprinted on their generation back in the 1970s, when ideas of “Russian national-imperial messianism” were overtaking the USSR’s old Communist universalism. It was through this lens that the Kremlin and most of society came to feel that the West “betrayed” Russia in the 1990s by violating the supposed contract according to which Moscow abandoned its empire.

Zorin calls this “the triumph of official interpretation over historical reality,” given that the Soviet Union collapsed due to internal problems, and the West hoped to save the USSR, fearing nuclear proliferation. Russia has resorted multiple times to the kind of isolationism seen today, after a failed attempt at “Europeanization.”

💰 The West’s evolving approach to sanctions against Russia

Speaking to Meduza, lawyer Pavel Ivlev described his years of work lobbying the U.S. government to sanction various Russian officials and oligarchs involved in the seizure of the oil company Yukos. He also argued that the main purpose of Washington’s sanctions today is to prevent further Russian aggression by punishing the political operators responsible and pressuring the businesspeople who have benefitted from the Putin regime’s stable functioning. Ivlev says Russian officials are more exposed than you might expect because many decided to hide their ill-gotten gains and buy coveted real estate in the West, believing that commitments to private property in Europe and America would protect them against seizure. For many years, this held true, and officials in the U.S. even remained reluctant to dismiss the legitimacy of Russia’s justice system, but the American government gradually changed its view and agreed to target Russian judges with sanctions and reject criminal convictions in politicized cases, like the verdicts against Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Asked about sanctions against then Yandex deputy CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan, Ivlev acknowledged that there is little evidence connecting the tech figure to the Kremlin, but he says such actions by the West are intended more to warn business leaders more broadly. Washington has also started pursuing “passive assets” (for example, oligarchs such as Yuri Milner investing in businesses like Facebook using resources from Alisher Usmanov, who is under sanctions). These measures are forcing some businesspeople to reassess their relationships with the Russian state, but other businesses are so intertwined with the state (for example, Gazprom and Rosneft are their main clients) that “changed attitudes” are impossible.

In the United States, the government process for collecting the expertise that determines sanctions designations is classified and kept “in house,” but officials absolutely rely in part on investigative journalism, says Ivlev.

👀 Putin’s two-front war at home

In an article for Republic, journalist Dmitry Kolezev argues that the Russian elite’s “war party,” led publicly by Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov, rejects any potential compromise with Ukraine. The “illusion of total support” for the war at home threatens to crumble once the body bags start returning, says Kolezev (though he recognizes that the Kremlin’s propaganda is flexible enough to declare victory even in defeat). As the regime tries to find and punish those responsible for the failures in Ukraine, Putin’s position as president grows weaker, necessitating not just a harsher crackdown against the opposition but within Russia’s political establishment itself.

🕊️ Russian Spring 2.0: Or how Moscow learned to stop worrying and love the non-West

In a lengthy article for Russia in Global Affairs, Carnegie Moscow Center director Dmitri Trenin (credited here merely as “a member of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy”) lays out a plan for a “new edition of Russia” based on the principle that geopolitics now trumps economic interests. He argues that the nation attempted something similar in the “Russian spring” movement of 2014 but failed. Now Russia has a “second chance” to make fundamental changes to its national orientation, “defeating not only theft and embezzlement but also cynicism, primitive materialism, and unbelief” under the conditions of “self-purification and self-determination.” At home, this means repatriating wealth, “reinvigorating” the ruling elite, and “renegotiating” the social contract, basing it on “trust and solidarity.” The country needs a renewed “Russian idea,” says Trenin, that reinforces the state’s values at home and abroad.

Trenin describes the West as newly consolidated around the United States thanks to a consensus that Russia is a common threat (he says nothing in this context about the invasion of Ukraine). Trenin argues that Russia should respond by accelerating its pivot to India and especially China but also to the global “non-West,” seeking to develop a shared agenda based on mutual interests. (He says this should include redirecting Russia’s expert and diplomatic resources from the West to the “non-West” in the East and South, particularly the non-European former Soviet Union.)

Moscow’s other main international goals, says Trenin, are (1) the strategic containment of the U.S., (2) facilitating Russia’s “self-development,” and (3) increasing integration with Belarus, the Eurasian Economic Union, and the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

Speaking delicately about Ukraine (and only in any depth at the end of the essay), Trenin says Moscow needs to be sure that Kyiv poses no “security threat” to Russia and also accepts the annexation of Crimea and independence of the Donbas.

🐉 The USA is still too worried about China to get serious about its anti-Russian coalition

In an article for the state newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Fyodor Lukyanov argues that diplomacy could be making a comeback in Ukraine as military methods prove to be incapable of achieving anything more than has already been achieved on the ground (at too high a price, he adds). Whatever the future of peace talks in Ukraine, Russia’s pivot to the East is now assured. It doesn’t even make sense for Moscow to sustain the time and resources it pours into diplomatic engagement with Europe and the United States, says Lukyanov.

If it really wanted to devastate Russia, the U.S. could try to tempt the likes of India and China into joining its anti-Moscow coalition, but Washington has relied on “moral reproaches” instead of real carrots and sticks. Lukyanov says this is because, even now during the war in Ukraine, America still sees China, not Russia, as its main adversary. As a result, he argues, a united anti-Russian front will be elusive.

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