Letter From the Editors
On July 28, Vladimir Putin sent his message out to the fleet to celebrate Navy Day, but less ceremonious events had already put people in a fighting mood both inside Russia and beyond.
Domestically, the opposition was roused from its years-long torpor by the so-called “Shadayev Law” (named after the digital development minister), a set of amendments to an unrelated infrastructure bill that envisages administrative penalties for accessing ‘extremist’ content. RFCP and Noviye Lyudi led the counterattack among the establishment opposition, with the former positioning itself as the main check on United Russia (senior party member Yury Afonin asked, “Do [they] want to discourage people from reading anything online that contains criticism of the situation in the country? But then Russia’s acute problems will never be resolved”), while the latter framed the issue in terms of civil liberties (recent presidential candidate Vladislav Davankov said the law “violates the principle of the presumption of innocence and sanctity of privacy”).
While United Russia, with its supermajority in the Duma, could not be prevented from passing the bill, the criticism did put the Kremlin on the back foot rhetorically. Apologists pointed out that the wording created a high threshold for liability – that the accused engage in “deliberate searches” for “knowingly extremist materials” – and Shadayev himself felt compelled to reassure users of legally gray Instagram. Meanwhile, former presidential near-candidate Boris Nadezhdin has reemerged as part of the nonestablishment protest movement, although, as Ivan Rodin points out, his petition for Putin to veto the bill represents “not so much a goal as a motivator for the ranks.”
The Kremlin’s foreign enemies are already sufficiently motivated, as was shown by a joint operation by Ukrainian and anti-Lukashenko Belarussian hackers that disrupted some Aeroflot services for over a day. The damage caused by the attacks is still being assessed. One company employee plausibly stated that it had caused “more damage to the company’s reputation than to its operations,” while cybersecurity experts floated long-term losses of up to $50 million. The hackers’ spokeswoman also alluded to potential use of Aeroflot data concerning people linked to the “military-industrial complex, intelligence operations or classified activities.”
While Ukrainians have been known to celebrate asymmetrical strikes on the Russian rear, during this time they were preoccupied with a domestic political crisis, the largest since the war broke out three and a half years ago. Crowds filled Theater Square, within sight of President Zelensky’s office, to protest legislation and raids to rein in anticorruption agencies. Novaya’s Olga Musafirova observes that “these young people don’t know much about the recent events that called the efficiency of [the agencies] into question. Instead, they tend to talk in more general terms about democracy and dictatorship,” in particular adopting the talking points of “I don’t want us to go back to the Yanukovich era” and “don’t let them steal Ukraine’s European future!”
Zelensky’s cageyness about his motives has done him no favors with the crowd of protesters. Officially, the purpose of the crackdown is for the agencies to operate “free from Russian influence.” The Russian press speculates – with some credibility – that this pretext is meant to spare the feelings of Zelensky’s European allies. RG’s Pavel Dulman explains: “When these agencies were created, many people in Ukraine had the impression that they were needed not so much to fight corruption as to control it – remotely, from overseas.” Yulia Timoshenko, who surely remembers that time well, is now catching flak for expressing similar sentiments.
Fickle crowds are shouting “Shame!” on the streets of Kiev. Europeans are engaged in cynical moral preening. And now, according to Izvestia’s sources in Russian intelligence, a coup plot is in the works between senior Ukrainian officials and those very same Westerners. Frankly, it looks very much like how Zelensky imagined his own downfall in later episodes of “Servant of the People.” Perhaps the Ukrainian president’s background in comedy is serving him well after all.