Eastern Radar #27
Cracking down on gambling in Russia, getting an organ transplant in Belarus, the 'uneven aid crusade' for the children of Chernobyl and more
Beeps
Podcasts: This week, Mark Galeotti talks about the adventures of a few select Russian technocrats in Russia as well as in separatist-controlled Eastern Ukraine. Also, Steven Seegel interviews Alison Smith about her latest book 'Cabbage and Caviar: A History of Food in Russia', while Sean Guillory talks to Timothy Frye about his own book, ‘Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia’.
Meanwhile, in the news:
🍔 Burger King is coming to Uzbekistan.
🤏 Privacy tools-seller Windscribe admitted it failed to encrypt company VPN servers — a major security flaw — that were recently confiscated by authorities in Ukraine.
🔥 Both Ukraine and Russia have sent planes to Turkey to help fight forest fires in the country.
💉 38% of Russians believe the coronavirus is a threat to public health, the lowest figure since the Russian Presidential Public Administration Academy (РАНХиГС) first asked the question.
👮 Ukrainian law enforcement agencies traded barbs on Saturday after a judge who disappeared in mysterious circumstances while facing a corruption investigation resurfaced and contacted the authorities from a village.
☦️ A Ukrainian baptist pastor was fined 30,000 rubles ($410) for “illegal missionary work” by a Russian court in the North Caucasus region of Kabardino-Balkaria.
Under the Radar
‘Smog, burning smell, and fire’: the life of a village during a forest fire [RU]
Elena Alekseeva | NewsYkt | July 27 | 970 words
Wondering where this is happening exactly? Here’s the villages of Yert on Google Maps.
The forest fire n°52 broke out on July 8, five kilometers from the village of Yert — 530 people live there, most around 50 years old. For ten days, the local men tried to extinguish it by hand, and only on July 19 did reinforcement arrive — 29 guys of the Aerial Forest Protection Service (Avialesookhrana) coming from Batagay and the Amur region. 60 people from the area also came to help. In the morning, we’re riding a tractor to the fire along with the Avialesookhrana guys and local volunteers. The situation has improved thanks to local entrepreneur Pavel Zakharov, who makes hay for bison 70 kilometers away and provided two of his own tractors to fight the fire, as well as a crew to maintain them.
As utility services collapse in separatist Donbass, the local population grows angry [RU]
Novosti Donbassa | July 23 | 1,100 words
In the first days of July, garbage collection stopped in Luhansk. In the summer heat, the problem was hard not to notice — and to smell. This isn’t the first failure of this kind, as utility companies in the separatist-controlled region simply fail to cope, facing worn-out equipment, waves of workers leaving because of low salaries and the lack of at least a thousand garbage trucks. Neither does this apply only to garbage collection: a few days ago, a small incident at a water pipe left the towns of Gorlovka, Khartsyzsk and Amvrosievka without any water. “They'll turn on the water for about 2-3 hours in the morning, and 2-3 hours in the evening. I've been living in the center of Luhansk for 60 years and it has never been like that,” one citizen from Luhansk complained. “It wasn't like that under Ukraine, but it's been like that these past 7 years... and alright, in 2014, there's the war, they were destroying all these pipes, electric wires... but it was a long time ago, it's all working now. So why do they turn off the water all the time??”
Russia’s crackdown on illegal gambling [RU]
Valeria Pozychanyuk, Irina Pankratova | The Bell | July 30 | 4,800 words
Russia had more than 6,000 casinos before 2006. But then, president Vladimir Putin decided to restrict gambling to four special zones (including the Western exclave of Kaliningrad and the remote Altai region in southern Siberia). Within six weeks, the relevant legislation was passed and gaming halls across the country shuttered. This new reality forced everyone in the gambling business to move online. And a raft of auxiliary businesses appeared: developing software, driving traffic, aggregating content, and devising ever more complex schemes to bypass the restrictions enforced by the Central Bank and avoid the attention of the intelligence services. Dozens of major financial market players helped create a network of ‘grey’ cross-border payment systems, according to multiple sources in the banking industry. This included some of the country’s biggest state-owned banks, which acted as acquirers and provided so-called ‘miscoding’ (each bank transaction has its own code and payments from online casinos should be labeled with code 7995, but corrupt bank staff would swap this code for another, enabling the transaction to proceed safely).
Hanna Belovolchenko | Zaborona | July 30 | 4,000 words
Going abroad for organs is a common story in independent Ukraine. If you need bone marrow – transplant lists in Turkey, Israel, Spain, or Germany are open. If you need a heart, a liver, kidneys, or lungs, you have a straight road to Belarus or India. But for Ukrainians hoping to get financial help from the state for organ transplantation, neighboring Belarus is pretty much the only option. Organs can’t wait for a patient forever. A heart needs to be transplanted within four hours, which is why, when recipient and donor data match, automated systems give the organ to whichever recipient is closer. It’s realistic for Ukrainians to reach Belarus by car or by plane in this timeframe. Belarusian waiting lists currently contain the names of 342 Ukrainians. Ukraine has paid for 18 of those patients – for a total sum of 31.3 million EUR. However, Ukrainian authorities halted air travel between the two countries on May 26, 2021.
Research & General Nerdistry
The International Crisis Group released a “visual explainer” on the Donbass conflict which includes clear and very valuable graphs and about the conflict’s casualties as well as the number of ceasefire violations since 2018.
Children of Chernobyl and the Uneven Aid Crusade
Isabelle DeSisto | David Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies | July 13
The “Children of Chernobyl,” a catch-all term for kids who suffered from the effects of the accident, attracted particular attention, as their bodies absorbed more radiation than adults’. The most common form of foreign aid involved health trips, in which children traveled abroad for rest, recovery, and medical treatment. The scale of foreign humanitarian aid to the Children of Chernobyl was impressive, but such assistance was also uneven: Belarusian children like young Svetlana Tikhanovskaya received considerably more international attention than their Ukrainian counterparts, both in media coverage and material benefits. This disparity in aid is puzzling, considering that most people associate the disaster with Ukraine, that Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko was hostile to foreign charities, and that Belarus was an authoritarian country subject to strict Western sanctions. My research revealed that three main factors drove the high volume of aid to Belarusian children: opposition engagement, the efforts of an outspoken activist, and Lukashenko’s foreign policy strategy.
‘No Time for Quality’: Mechanisms of Local Governance in Russia 🔒
Aleksei Gilev, Daria Dimke | Europe-Asia Studies | July 2021
How does centralisation affect public goods provision in Russian municipalities? Drawing on the evidence from 68 interviews with municipal elites in four Russian regions, we demonstrate that, first, centralisation through excessive regulation encourages the provision of a higher quantity of public goods but does not encourage their quality. Short time horizons and haste lower the quality of goods even further. Moreover, centralisation favours municipalities with higher state capacity. Finally, risk-averse behaviour by officials leads to a lower quality of public goods.
ICYMI
Stories from well-known outlets you might nevertheless have missed.
Reuters: Keeping Out of the Line of Fire
Agence France Presse: 'We need more people': Exhausted firefighters battle Siberia blazes
Newslines Magazine: ‘A Happy Marriage Begins by Crying’: Kyrgyzstan’s Tradition of Kidnapping and Raping Brides
From a reporting trip in Western Ukraine back in 2017: the dispatching center of the Prykarpattyaoblenergo power station in Ivano-Frankivsk — which had the doubtful honor of seeing its power grid shut down in the first cyberattack of this kind ever recorded — and its old-school, mosaic-style map of the regional power grid. Pictures by Fabrice Deprez.