Eastern Radar #26
Sex workers on the Donbass frontline, the FBI, Russia, and Ukraine’s failed cybercrime investigation, cryptocurrencies in eastern Siberia and more
Hello everyone. My apologies for taking so long to bring you this 26th issue of Eastern Radar, the past few weeks have been a bit rough. I have suspended all paid subscriptions as I’m not confident that I’ll be able to stick to a weekly schedule in the coming months. But Eastern Radar is still here! I even hope to bring you a bit of a different piece this week on top of the usual newsletter. Thank you for the support, I hope you enjoy this issue.
Beeps
On the podcast front: the first episode of “Don't Call Me Devochka,” a podcast about what it means to be a woman in today’s Russia, dropped out this month; the latest episode of the SRB podcast talks about weddings and power in early modern Russia; The War on the Rocks team discusses if and how the US can strengthen its Russia policy; and, for Russian speakers, a fascinating podcast about Russian bureaucracy, hosted by a former finance ministry official and featuring interviews with various (anonymous) officials (thanks to Fabian Burkhardt for bringing it to my attention).
Now for some news:
🎖️ Here’s how Tajikistan’s state press agency described president Emomali Rahmon in a piece about unprecedented military exercise involving 230,000 tajik troops amid fear of chaos in neighboring Afghanistan: “Leader of the nation, president of the Republic of Tajikistan, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of Tajikistan, army general, dear Emomali Rahmon”
🕵️ Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) announced in June it had signed a $4.5m dollars contract to acquire spying equipment (for open-source intelligence and identification of phone numbers) from 2 Israeli companies. The SBU explained the contract by the need to fight “hybrid warfare”, but the purchase is reportedly spurring controversy in Kyiv.
🚊 The trial of three men accused of stealing €100m from TransmashHolding, Russia's biggest manufacturer of locomotives and rail equipment, kicked off last week at the Federal Criminal Court of Switzerland.
😷 Local authorities in Russia’s Rostov region reported last week the death of a man from human rabies following a stray cat bite in April.
📜 The U.S. Attorney’s Office announced on July 22 the seizure of 17 Jewish funeral scrolls, Pinkas manuscripts and community records that had been taken from Jewish communities in Romania, Hungary, Ukraine and Slovakia during World War II.
Under the Radar
Alexey Ukhankov, Evgeniya Sibirtseva | 7x7 | June 21 | 2,300 words
Since 2014, several Russian regions have installed road cameras that can automatically record traffic violations, as part of the public-private partnership "Integrated Road Traffic Safety System" (SKBDD). Many drivers were angry to find out that private firms began to receive money from these fines, so 7x7 journalists decided to find out how the system works, using the example of the Kostroma region. They discovered that most of the profits from the fines end up not in the state or local budget, but in the pocket of a company linked to businessmen who are themselves closely associated with government agencies. Who makes money on traffic fines, what does a company based in Cyprus, a former advisor to the deputy minister of Transport and a Russian billionaire have to do with it, and how did the Kostroma region ended up giving more than a billion rubles out of the 1.3 billion it had received to an investor — 7x7 investigates.
Strike, exile, arrest: what happened to Belarusian workers?
Alexey Shuntov | Mediazona, openDemocracy (translation) | June 23 | 4,000 words
Magidov returned to work on 1 September. On 2 November, he learned that a criminal case had been opened against him and three of his colleagues: Igor Povarov, Alexander Bobrov and Yevgeny Govor –over a “gross violation of public order”. According to the investigation, together with “other unidentified persons”, the four activists “organised illegal group actions, grossly violating public order and showed clear disobedience to the legitimate demands of the authorities”. The workers’ homes were searched, after which they were taken to the local police department. In the department, Magidov recalls being interrogated on camera by an investigative group from Gomel. “And then everyone was given the following offer: state television was supposed to come and shoot a report, [and we were supposed to say] how much we all repent, how much [we] were paid, that we had been fooled and so on. I asked: ‘What should we say?’ ‘We'll tell you,’ he says. Of course, we did not know at that time that it would be so tough. We thought, maybe six months in prison, a year, and then after several months we would be out on amnesty. But nobody wanted to become a laughing stock. No one was afraid to spend time in prison.”
Inside the FBI, Russia, and Ukraine’s failed cybercrime investigation
Patrick Howell O'Neill | MIT Technology Review | July 8 | 4,400 words
...Passwaters—now a cofounder and executive at the American cybersecurity firm Intel 471, where Craig also works—says it was practically a full-time job to review the chat logs and share the information with the FSB and the SBU, Ukraine’s chief security and intelligence service. In April 2010, as he was sifting through the data, Passwaters saw a message he’d never forget. Another hacker had written to Tank: “You guys are fucked. The FBI is watching. I’ve seen the logs.” Passwaters knew the logs in question were the ones he was reading at that exact moment—and that their existence was known only to a handful of agents. Somehow, they had been leaked. The agents suspected Ukrainian corruption.
How sex workers live on the Donbas frontline [UKR/RU]
Sasha Gorchinskaya, Alexandra Gorchinskaya | NV | July 21 | 2,300 words
Like Oksana, Marina says it's become scarier to work on the road. Customers used to be more diverse, but are now mostly made of locals — after the war in Donbass started, the traffic decreased on the local roads, and the number of customers decreased along with it. The women say they've had to endure violence from men time and time again, both from pro-Russian insurgents back in 2014, and from Ukrainian soldiers after Sloviansk's liberation. "There are some that are normal of course, they're not all like that. But there are also idiots, and there were scary situations, when I had to run through the fields" says Marina. [...] Tatyana also remembers 2014 with fear. When fighters of the so-called “DNR” seized Sloviansk, she recalls, women were especially scared for their lives: “You go to work and don't know if you’ll come back. They’d take everyone, the drug addicts, the former prisoners. The so-called “DNR authorities” prohibited drugs, but used them anyway.”
Research & General Nerdistry
Reconstructing the past: narratives of Soviet occupation in Ukrainian museums 🔒
Valentyna Kharkhun | Canadian Slavonic Papers | July 2021
This article examines narratives of occupation in portrayals of the Soviet past in Ukrainian museums. The paper analyzes the juridical, historical, and ideological usage of the term “Soviet occupation” in the Ukrainian context to illuminate the political and cultural circumstances that favoured the creation of Ukrainian museums of occupation. A separate section is devoted to the narrative of occupation found in the museums of other post-Soviet countries, in order to distinguish Ukrainian peculiarities. The article focuses on the Museum of Soviet Occupation and the Kyiv Occupation Museum to discuss the institutionalization of the occupation narrative within Ukraine, examining the main memory actors, dominant narratives, and visitors’ experiences in the establishment and further development of such institutions. This research reveals the essentially anti-Soviet and anti-Russian pathos of narratives of occupation in Ukrainian museums, emphasizing the ways in which they reproduce the Soviet style of history telling.
Career trajectories of regional officials: Russia and China before and after 2012 🔒
Thomas F. Remington, Andrei A. Yakovlev, Elena Ovchinnikova, Alexander Chasovsky | Eurasian Geography and Economics | June 2021
Authoritarian leaders rely on regional leaders for both political support and the fulfillment of their policy objectives. In addition, top leaders face trade-offs between following established rules for managing bureaucratic officials’ careers and exercising a free hand in choosing regional officials. This paper compares patterns of appointment of regional officials in Russia and China before and after 2012. In recent years, the leaders of both countries have centralized and personalized state power. We hypothesize that these changes have altered policies for managing the appointments of regional leaders in such a way as to increase their dependence on the central authorities and reduce their autonomy to create their own networks at the regional level. We analyze a comprehensive original set of biographical data on all top regional officials from 2003 through 2019 in China and from 2000 through 2019 in Russia. We discern clear differences between the pre- and post-2012 period for China and less marked differences for pre- and post-2012 Russia. Turnover of regional officials has become more frequent in both systems; average tenure in office has fallen; and the share of “outsiders” has risen. However, the corps of regional officials has not been rejuvenated.
Local Dimensions of the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict 🔓
Franziska Smolnik, Leila Alieva, Tamar Shirinian, John O'Loughlin, Gerard Toal, Kristin Bakke | Center for Security Studies - ETH Zürich | May 2021
This issue of the Caucasus Analytical Digest deals with Local Dimensions of the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict. Firstly, Leila Alieva explores the securitization/de-securitization processes and attitudes towards the conflict in Azerbaijan in the periods before, during, and after the 2020 conflict in Karabagh; secondly, Tamar Shirinian discusses the affective connections between the two spectres of soldiers who are missing or who have died in action and the old political economic elite who now threaten to regain power, and the political implications of national trauma on Armenia’s post-war futures; thirdly, John O’Loughlin, Gerard Toal, and Kristin Bakke analyze the somewhat contradictory results of a February 2020 survey of inhabitants of Karabakh concerning the questions of territory and peace.
Olga Onuch, Emma Mateo, Julian G. Waller | Social Media + Society | April 2021
We have provided substantial evidence that greater skepticism is necessary toward claims about the importance of social media during periods of mass mobilization. In the context of the EuroMaidan and the period immediately following mass mobilization, we find that social media usage was not noticeably associated with protest mobilization, general views on the protests, or belief in common disinformation narratives. Instead, we consistently find that “old” broadcast media consumption is significantly and substantively associated with these three aspects of public behavior and belief. We confirm hypotheses that Russian television is strongly and negatively associated with protest participation, as well as in general negative attitudes toward the EuroMaidan and an increased likelihood of believing disinformation narratives regarding malign, foreign control over protest organization. We also find that consuming Ukrainian television makes it less likely that one buys into such disinformation. Our analysis also suggests that traditional macro-cleavages in Ukraine regarding identity, economic grievances, and region play strong roles in informing participation and views.
Cryptocurrencies and processing power in Russia: a new strategic territory in eastern Siberia? 🔒
Hugo Estecahandy, Kevin Limonier | Journal of Cyber Policy | June 2021
This paper analyses the emerging Russian cryptocurrency mining industry, with a particular focus on eastern Siberia. This major strategic industry provides the region with a growing calculation power and fosters potential innovations – in encryption especially. In fact, the crypto-mining industry has noticeably coalesced in eastern Siberia because the region offers a series of geographic, climatic, economic and technical advantages – the magnitude of which is hard to match anywhere else in the world. This article focuses on the oblast of Irkutsk and shows how crypto-mining has come to encompass both economic and political powers and to involve a number of Russian actors and infrastructures. Ultimately, the local dynamics in eastern Siberia teach us a lot about the fate of the industry nationally.
ICYMI
Stories from well-known outlets you might nevertheless have missed.
Financial Times: Sadness, dissent and Stalin — Russian video games uncovered
Christian Science Monitor: Russians say Marvel’s ‘Black Widow’ is ‘klyukva.’ That’s not flattering.
South China Morning Post: China-Ukraine infrastructure deal a surprise for observers of Beijing, Kyiv and Moscow geopolitics
Politico Europe: Water wars in east Ukraine
OCCRP: Huge Quantities of Chinese Cigarettes Smuggled Into Ukraine
New Yorker: Four Stories From the Russian Arctic
RFE/RL: How Coca-Cola Helped Uzbekistan Seize A Lucrative Bottling Operation From U.S. Citizens
CNN: An American lawyer went on a lunch date in Moscow. Now he's languishing in a jail cell in Belarus
11 anti-tank mines are blown up on July 3 by Azerbaijan’s demining agency. The demonstration was part of a press tour in the Nagorno-Karakbah region, as well as in the neighboring territories seized back by Azerbaijan during the 2020 war with Armenia. Picture by Fabrice Deprez.