Eastern Radar #37
A triple murder near Russia's border with Kazakhstan, a failed satellite launch, "Passportization" in separatist-controlled Donbas, buying "Brothers Karamazov" in the 1880s and more
Beeps
📜 The Ukrainian parliament published in January English translations for 181 laws, a move an MP described as a “green light for investors in Ukraine.”
🌡️ 58% of the energy used in Estonia for heating and cooling comes from renewable sources, the second-highest share in the EU. Latvia comes third at 57%.
☀️ 71% of Ukrainians say they’re happy, according to a poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
📺 HBO Max is launching in 15 additional countries on March 8, 2022: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Under the Radar
Near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan, a triple murder and unanswered questions [RU]
Vyacheslav Kumpan, Irina Burkina | NGS55.ru | January 22 | 1,700 words
Yurevka is in the south of the Omsk region, not five kilometers from the border with Kazakhstan. As we get to the village’s entrance, border guards stop us, ask to see documents and say that, because of the state of emergency, we can’t get in without a special pass. We still manage to enter, half an hour later.
The night of January 21-22 was a frosty one. The three children of Yurevka resident - two daughters and a son - were sleeping soundly when the noise of someone banging on the house’s window rang on the street. The children's mother got out of bed and went to the front door. And then, according to the teenage daughter, they heard their mother screaming that her stepfather was being stabbed. The girl caught a glimpse of the attacker, she ran out into the street to call for help, her little brother running after her. The two children rushed to the house of a neighbor, Andrei. The neighbor went with two other people to the girl’s house and found the bodies of the girl’s mother, step-father and 10 year old, handicapped sister.
The teenage daughter described the killer as a skinny man of about 45 years, with a wrinkled face and a beard, wearing a black hat and a black jacket. In the village, Svetlana, a shopkeeper, does not understand how the man could have escaped, how such a violent crime could take place in the border zone. “I am old, I was born here, and now I have no words,” she says. “Now two guys came by (security officers - ed.), said that they haven't found him yet. Is he invisible? Carves up a family and disappears without a trace. It doesn't make sense to me.”
Commentary from Mestami, a media project highlighting great regional journalism across Russia: This is an incredible report. Do you know why? Because, a couple days after the NGS55 correspondents went to the village and wrote this story, it emerged that almost none of it was true. There was no bearded man with a black hat. The teenage girl’s family has been murdered by her 17 years-old boyfriend, who was taking revenge on the girl’s stepfather, allegedly for molesting her. The death of the 10 years-old sister wasn’t planned. The entire story about the foreign man was made up.
What’s behind the launch of the Ukrainian satellite “Sich-2-30”? [UKR/RU]
Alexander Gumenyuk | Zaborona | February 2 | 2,400 words
Zaborona already wrote a few months ago that Sich-2-30 was not a new satellite, but a copy of the Sich-2 satellite launched into space by Ukraine 11 years ago. The copy was needed to practice emergency situations that could unfold in orbit. Despite claims that it would be operational for at least five years, that first satellite worked for only six months before turning into space garbage. Its copy went to the warehouses of the Yuzhnoye Design Office in Dnepr.
The story with the possible launch of a satellite using SpaceX interested Mikhail Lev. First, it would cost many times less than with other companies they were used to working with. Second, the launch of even an obsolete satellite could become a symbol of the Ukrainian space industry.’s revival. Third, several million dollars had already been spent on the satellite, and a choice had to be made: to admit that all this money had been wasted, or to add a few million more and send the satellite into space.
“The audience hasn’t disappeared” Did the ban of “Medvedchuk’s TV channels” have any impact? [UKR]
Oleh Chernysh | BBC Ukraine | February 11 | 1,100 words
Last year, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), 40.8% of respondents called the TV channels’ ban a "mistake'' while 34.6% called it a "necessary step to protect the state." As of now, KIIS Director Volodymyr Paniotto believes that the ban lowered the ratings of the pro-Russian Opposition Platform - For Life (OPFL) party, which they have been actively covering. “The channels’ closure has affected party ratings. Despite the fact that the number of Internet users has grown significantly over the past two years, the popularity of television, i.e. the number of people who use it as their main source of political information, has fallen by only 10%” he told BBC Ukraine.
Indeed, if a year ago 20.7% of respondents were ready to vote for the OPFL party, it crashed down to 11.6% this year according to KIIS polls. But the sociologist clarifies that, following the criminal prosecution of Viktor Medvedchuk, some OPFL supporters do not admit their support for the party in polls, and the figures can therefore underestimate the actual rating. “Sanctions reduced the audience, according to our estimates, by 25%,” according to Oksana Romanyuk, head of the Institute of Mass Media. “But this audience immediately moved to other sites, it did not disappear, was not ‘reprogrammed’”.
Research & Culture
A very telling graph showing how many times “fascism” was mentioned in the Soviet party mouthpiece “Pravda” from 1938 to 1942.
u/Dicranurus | r/AskHistorians | January 11
A teacher could afford Brothers Karamazov, but there are a number of challenges to overcome. Much of Russian literary fiction of the 19th century was published in journals rather than books, and distributed to subscribers (theoretically bounded only by the limitations of the post office, but in practice concentrated in urban areas). In the 1880s an industrial laborer could expect to earn 70 kopecks to 1 ruble a day, and books ranged from 1 ruble to 10 rubles depending on circulation and printing quality-- a teacher can afford a book, but it would be a splurge. [...] Public libraries ostensibly appear in the liberal 1830s, but without state funding and supplies they were functionally inaccessible; by the 1860s, paid libraries (on a subscription basis) were relatively common, but often only had a few hundred books. Literary fiction again played a very small part, which brings us to the question of literacy: only around 20% of Russians were literate in 1880, and most who were had been taught using the Bible and hagiographies. Fiction didn't really factor into secondary education, and was perceived circumspectly by both the rural populations and regional administrators.
Ariadna Capasso, Halyna Skipalska, Urmi Chakrabarti, Sally Guttmacher, Peter Navario, Theresa P. Castillo | Journal of Interpersonal Violence | December 2021
Since 2014, a protracted armed conflict has afflicted eastern Ukraine, resulting in the displacement of over 1.4 million residents. The resulting humanitarian crisis has placed women, particularly displaced women, at greater risk of gender-based violence (GBV). Many GBV incidents in Ukraine have been reported along the “contact line,” the border separating government from non-government-controlled areas. This study compares types of GBV experienced by displaced and local (non-displaced) women receiving psychosocial support in order to identify the gaps in services during a time of conflict. Data was collected by mental healthcare providers from 11,826 women (25.5% displaced; 74.5% local) aged 15 to 69 receiving psychosocial services in five conflict-affected regions from February 2016 to June 2017. Overall, almost half of the women experienced intimate partner violence and psychological abuse. Compared to residents, displaced women were more likely to report non-domestic GBV incidents involving sexual and economic violence. Almost 8% of violent incidents against displaced women occurred at checkpoints or at reception centers for internally displaced persons (IDP) and 20% were perpetrated by armed men.
Passportization, Diminished Citizenship Rights, and the Donbas Vote in Russia’s 2021 Duma Elections
Fabian Burkhardt, Maryna Rabinovych, Cindy Wittke, Elia Bescotti | Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute | January 2022
Referring in this paper to the extraterritorial naturalization of Donbas residents en masse, passportization is one of Russia’s preeminent foreign policy tools to deepen the potentially explosive deadlock in the implementation of the Minsk Agreements. In this deadlock, passportization can serve as a tool of ambiguous Russian extraterritorial governance over the Donbas while keeping violence at a comparatively low level, or as a tool to justify a full-scale Russian military intervention to “protect” its citizens from, for example, a purported “genocide.” [...] Passportization of residents of the non-government-controlled areas of the Donbas does not endow these Ukrainians with full membership of the Russian state; they are “second-class citizens” with diminished rights. This becomes especially apparent with regard to not only international non-recognition, but also pensions, social benefits, and voting rights. [...] Ukraine urgently needs a coherent long-term policy toward its citizens in the non-government-controlled territories. Policy suggestions from various actors range from hawkish (stripping Donbas residents with Russian passports of Ukrainian citizenship) to conciliatory (de facto recognition of some documents issued by the “DPR” and “LPR”). This hodgepodge of proposed policy responses unmistakably sends the wrong signals to Donbas residents.
‘They Have To Go To Greenland’: Russian whalers in Norway in 1726
Alexei Kraikovski | The Mariner's Mirror | January 2022
On 10 May 1726, jurors Ble Eliasen Rezand and Andreas Osen met in the customs office of Lille-Fosen (now Kristiansund) a town south of Trondheim, Norway. They had to settle a conflict between the local customs officer Christian Friis and the crew and commander of the Walvis. This vessel came to Fosen harbour at the end of the previous autumn, looking for a safe escape from the storms. Despite the ship's Dutch name meaning ‘whale', it was a Russian vessel. Its arrival in Norway came as a result of a government project, started in late 1723, when Peter the Great signed a decree ordering ships to be built using European construction methods, and to hire Dutch harpooners to start whaling near Spitsbergen at the treasury's expense. The flotilla of Russian whalers with the hired Dutch experts onboard had to winter in Kola, the northernmost port of Russia and the only Russian permanent settlement on the Barents Sea coast. According to the government plan, after wintering in Kola in spring 1726, the three ships would depart for Spitsbergen to participate in the international competition for blubber in the Arctic. Yet, everything went wrong from the very beginning. In the autumn of 1725 one ship was stranded and unable to leave Arkhangelsk, a second was lost soon after departure, and the Walvis faced a heavy storm, which restricted its passage to Kola bay and forced the ship to look for safety in Norwegian waters. The documents relating to the Russian whalers' conflict with the local fiscal authorities are kept in the files of the Collegium of Commerce, the central Russian governmental agency responsible for the development of trade in the Empire. They provide an interesting insight into the story of this first recorded international voyage of a Russian whaling ship.
ICYMI
Stories from well-known outlets you might nevertheless have missed.
Bloomberg: Russia and Europe Are Vital to Each Other When It Comes to Oil
Al Jazeera: Timeline: How did the recent Ukraine-Russia crisis start?
The New York Times: Finland's President Knows Putin Well. And He Fears for Ukraine.
Reuters: Turkmenistan to hold early presidential election on March 12
War On The Rocks: A Letter from Moscow: (In)divisible Security and Helsinki 2.0
Foreign Policy: Why Mediation Around Ukraine Keeps Failing