Eastern Radar #10
Fake Fabergé eggs, femicides in Kyrgyzstan, stealing a Soviet satellite, how the Donbas war began and more
Beeps
Hi there! On the personal news front, I’ll now be writing this newsletter not from Kyiv, where I’ve lived these past three years, but from Paris, where I will for the coming year be covering Eastern Europe (as well as Central and Southern Asia) for French daily La Croix. It’s a big change for me but —hopefully— not for this newsletter.
On the podcast front, the indispensable SRB Podcast released its latest episode, about the way the Soviet Union tried to irrigate the Aral Sea basin, ultimately leading to one of the greatest environmental catastrophes of the late twentieth century. And if you understand Russian, you should definitely check out this podcast by Meduza on mat’, Russia’s colorful and incredible extensive collection of jargon, slang and expletives.
And as usual, bits of news you probably missed:
🤬 Speaking of mat’, turns out that Russia’s new ban on using swear words on social media led to more people using swear words on social media.
✈️ Ten years after its maiden flight, China will stop using Russian engines in its stealth fighter in favour of an upgraded home-grown engine.
👷 There are currently between 2,000 and 3,000 foreign workers from Turkey, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Ukraine, and Romania working on construction projects in Serbia, Construction Chamber vice-president Goran Rodić said on Monday.
🐣 A leading London-based art dealer has accused the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg of mounting a Fabergé exhibition featuring more than 20 “tawdry fakes” from the collection of Alexander Ivanov, a Russian oligarch with ties to Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.
👵 1 in 7 pensioners is at risk of poverty in the European Union, with the highest shares in Latvia (54%), Estonia (51%), Bulgaria (36%) and Lithuania (35%).
🔫 Ukrainian small arms manufacturer “Mayak” announced the production of a new Kalashnikov platform that will feature a variety of calibers, including the NATO standard 5.56. The company called this new platform “KalashNash” — likely a reference to “Krym nash” (Crimea is ours), a popular Russian patriotic slogan that followed the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Under the Radar
“I would have killed her anyway”. Kloop’s investigation of femicide in Kyrgyzstan
Anna Kapushenko, Savia Khasanova | Kloop | January 28
At the end of September 2019, 51-year-old Adyl struck his wife with an axe while she slept. A criminal case alleging murder with particular cruelty was brought before Sokuluk District Court. During the hearing, it was revealed that Adyl had bought the axe for 400 som two months before the murder and had concealed it in the shed. It was likewise revealed that Adyl had killed his wife because “she was always bothering him, turning off the television while he watched.” On the day of the murder, Aizady had a headache and turned off the television. Adyl was furious. He waited until his wife was asleep, then retrieved the axe from the shed and struck Aizady in the head several times. “I don’t regret the crime at all. I had planned to kill her for a long time and would have killed her regardless,” he declared during the hearing. The court found him guilty and sentenced him to 14 years in prison.
Plagiarism did not do Rostov doctors any good [RU]
Maria Lazebnaya | Troytskiy Varyant | January 28
Accusations of corruption, lawsuits and high profile resignations have plagued the healthcare system of the Rostov region in recent years. In 2019, Valery Bushtyrev, the chief doctor of a Rostov perinatal center, was accused of illegally producing oxygen as the center reportedly did not have the license to do so. And while the Prosecutor’s Office dismissed the case a year later and apologized to Bushtyrev for illegal prosecution, the center’s oxygen filling station hasn’t fully resumed its work since. Bushtyrev accused the region’s Health minister Tatyana Bykovskaya of initiating the attack on him, in a confrontation that cost Bushtyrev his job and the city a unit that, according to Bushtyrev, could have fully supplied Rostov-on-Don with medical oxygen. Tatyana Bykovskaya resigned in October of last year, after several patients in Rostov-on-Don’s hospital N°20 reportedly died following interruption of their oxygen supply.
Excess mortality reveals Covid's true toll in Russia
Dmitry Kobak | Royal Statistical Society | February 3
Computing excess mortality in Russia from April to November yields a grim result of 264,100 excess deaths (95% interval: [232,000, 296,200]) – see Figure 1. The yearly number of deaths in Russia has been monotonically decreasing over the last decade, and our estimate accounts for that by projecting the linear yearly trend from 2015–2019 into 2020, using that as a baseline to measure the excess mortality; predictive uncertainty gives the standard error. Alternatively, simple subtraction of 2019 deaths from 2020 deaths yields 242,600 excess deaths, while subtraction of the 2017–2019 average yields 230,800 excess deaths. Here we use 264,100 as the most reliable point estimate of excess deaths, meaning that our estimate of excess mortality is 6.5 times as large as the 40,500 deaths reported in the international dashboards during the same period. This estimate of excess mortality from April to November corresponds to 0.18% of the country's population.
Research, Culture & General Nerdistry
Lunik: Inside the CIA’s audacious plot to steal a Soviet satellite
Jeff Maysh | MIT Technology Review | January 28
The boastful Soviets had sent their Luna rockets on a world tour. At one exhibition in New York, American spies had confirmed that a Luna on display was legit. The CIA plotted to kidnap the spacecraft, loot it, and put it back without the Soviets knowing. But they dared not tamper with it on American soil. Then the CIA learned that on November 21 the Soviet exhibition was headed to the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City. An intercepted shipping manifest described “models of astronomic apparatus.” The dimensions of the crate matched the Luna rocket: 17 feet long and 8 feet wide. Jackpot. The CIA just needed several hours alone to disassemble, photograph, scrape the rocket for remnants of liquid fuel, and inspect the parts for factory markings that could give them intelligence on Soviet operations.
How the War Began: Conceptualizing Conflict Escalation in Ukraine’s Donbas 🔓
Jakob Hauter | The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review | January 25
This article proposes a new theoretical framework based on conflict escalation theory and the concept of critical junctures to facilitate a more transparent analysis of the war in Ukraine’s Donbas. It develops a theory-guided escalation sequence model. According to this model, the conflict’s formative phase consisted of an escalation sequence that lasted from April until August 2014 and comprised six critical junctures. This article argues that attempts to explain the conflict should be evaluated and compared in terms of their ability to explain these critical junctures. It concludes that similar escalation sequence models could improve research on armed conflict beyond the case of the Donbas.
Juliette Bretan | Culture.pl | February 1
From Tadeusz to Jadwiga, Stanisław to Mikołaj, Polish names are quite recognizable. They come from a variety of sources, too – there are Slavic names; Polonised versions of foreign names; or those which have their roots in from Poland’s shifting borders, including names of Germanic or Lithuanian origin. Many are still highly popular today, and have notable use in history, cropping up in Polish literature and amongst Polish celebrities. But what about the Polish names which have long been lost with the passage of time?