Eastern Radar #33
Ridesharing to circumvent Covid restrictions in Kazan, a murder attempt and a case dismissed in Moscow, an unusual Soviet "sniper camera" and more
Radio Chatter
War on the Rocks’ podcast turns to International Crisis Group’s senior analyst Olesya Vartanyan to discuss the recent border clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Beeps
💼 Targeted by sanctions and criminal charges, Ukrainian pro-Russian politician and oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk hired the Berlin-based Malmendier Legal law firm to boost his legal defense. “We cannot sanction Russia over Navalny and look the other way in Ukraine over Medvedchuk,” a senior partner of the company said on November 11.
🎨 Moscow’s Garage museum will expand into a 100-year-old abandoned exhibition pavilion in Gorky Park.
🏒 The “Donbas” hockey club announced the creation of a new Ukrainian hockey league along with 6 other leagues. With the “Kramatorsk” club, the “Donbas” team was expelled from the Ukrainian Hockey League after they violated rules by fielding temporarily suspended players in matches. “Donbas” won four of the five previous seasons of the Ukrainian Hockey League.
☢️ US nuclear power company Westinghouse signed the initial contract for the construction of AP1000 nuclear plants in Ukraine.
✊ Rare protests in Tajikistan’s remote Gorno-Badakhshan region continued for a third day on November 27, after one protester was killed and five members of law enforcement were injured when a crowd stormed a local government building.
Under the Radar
e-Kazan | November 24 | 600 words
Since November 22, vaccination certificates with the accompanying QR code have become mandatory to board Tatarstan's buses and tramways. How do those without QR codes still make it work? The fearless try to board without a certificate. The more modest have resigned themselves to outrageous taxi prices. And the most resourceful have set up chat rooms to find rides. It’s all on Telegram — not two or three, but an entire network of groups which, in the past few days, have gone from a couple hundred to, for some, more than 10,000 followers. In order not to get lost, administrators ask people to use the hashtags #водитель (#driver) or #пассажир (#passenger). Some look for rides not for themselves, but for their grandmother or grandfather. And while most drivers are actually to let people ride for free, some feel like latent taxis.
A military investigator, a murder attempt, and a case dismissed [RU]
Alexey Sokovnin | Kommersant | November 11 | 600 words
The plan to end the life of military investigator Aleksandr Pautov was simple: slash one of the tires on his car, wait for the man — who had been investigating the former owner of a Russian state security company for fraud — to come out, and kill him. But the car alarm turned on, Pautov called the cops, and the attempt was thwarted. Three suspects were quickly identified: Vladimir Podolsky, an FSB major general who had also commanded the legendary “Vympel'' spetsnaz unit and had been the general director of the security company; Andrey Polshchikov, the company’s executive director; his wife and son who, back in 2012, were appointed deputy directors of the company and received up to 24 million rubles (around $300,000) for entirely fictional work; and Oleg Grishchenko, who received 5 million rubles (around $66,000) in April 2016 to kill Aleksandr Pautov. And yet, a military court quickly dismissed the case, while a new court attempted to change the charge against Polshchikov and Grishchenko from “attempt on the life of the person conducting the preliminary investigation” to “complicity in obstructing the investigation” — the latter charge only carrying the threat of a minor fine.
Developments in separatist Donbas: 2 November– 24 November 2021
Nikolaus von Twickel | Civic Monitoring | November 25 | 1,600 words
In a decree published on 15 November President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian government to treat products from “Certain areas of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions” (i.e. the “People’s Republics”) as Russian products and to recognize local product certificates, thus de facto annexing them to the Russian-led customs union. Kyiv-based journalist Andrii Dikhtarenko pointed out that – with the exception of coal – lingering quality problems, raw material shortages and difficult logistics make it very hard to sell local products in Russia. Dikhtarenko speculated that the Kremlin decree might rather prompt “grey imports” from Ukraine to get to Russia via the “People’s Republics”. Moscow-based Ukrainian expert Konstantin Skorkin suggested that the main gain may be political – that Moscow was more and more recognizing the “Republics” as subjects.
Research & Culture
Yandex has a Russian to emoji translator.
Will Nepo’s supercomputer give him world chess title edge over Carlsen?
Sean Ingle | The Guardian | November 25 | 1,200 words
It would count as one of the more seismic shocks in modern chess history if Magnus Carlsen were to lose his world title over the next three weeks here in Dubai. Yet when his Russian opponent Ian Nepomniachtchi plays the first move of their 14-game match on Friday he will be armed with two potentially intriguing advantages. The first is that Nepomniachtchi – or Nepo as he is widely known – holds a 4-1 record in classical chess over Carlsen, dating back to when they first met as promising 12-year-olds. The second? He also has one of Russia’s fastest supercomputers, originally built for machine learning and artificial intelligence, as part of his team. After qualifying to face Carlsen by winning the Fide candidates tournament in Yekaterinburg this year, Nepomniachtchi credited the Zhores supercomputer, based in the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow, as helping him and his team evaluate tens of millions of positions per second. This week the Russian confirmed to the Guardian that he was using it again to prepare for Carlsen.
Hands-On with the Weird Fotosnaiper Soviet Sniper Camera
Michael Zhang | PetaPixel | February 18 | 400 words [+ video]
Photographer Mathieu Stern was browsing a flea market when he came across a Zenit Fotosnaiper, a Soviet-era camera rig that looks and feels more like a rifle. The Zenit Fotosnaiper first appeared in the 1940s and was designed for military use as an observation camera. The rifle-style stock attachment helps the photographer be mobile yet stable at the same time. As it was refined over the years, it was also redesigned for civilian use. “What’s the main problem with the PhotoSniper? You’re unlikely to go unnoticed by the people around you,” Stern says in the 7-minute video review above. “In the best-case scenario, they will ask you what you are doing. In the worst-case scenario, they will freak out and call the police because of the terrorist walking around with a rocket launcher.” Stern later decided to test the optics of just the TAIR-3S 300mm f/4.5 lens by adapting it to his Sony a7 III mirrorless camera using a M42 to Sony FE adapter. “The 16 aperture blades give you great bokeh,” Stern says. “I must say I was blown away by the quality of the lens. It’s incredibly sharp.”
ICYMI
Stories from well-known outlets you might nevertheless have missed.
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