Eastern Radar #5
Postal service in separatist Donbass, a massive illegal timber scam in the taiga, how imperial Russia spied on China and more
Say you're in Germany and want to send a package to a friend living in Donetsk, a Ukrainian city that has been outside of Kyiv's control for six years now. What do you do? Of course, Ukraine’s state institutions do not work in the region anymore. International postal service requires international recognition, but not even Moscow has recognized the "People's Republics" in Eastern Ukraine (despite providing them with ample financial and military support).
The workaround advertised by the separatist “Post of Donbass” on its website is a fascinating window into the murky relationship between Russia and the Donbass statelets: parcels should be addressed to the P.O box n°12 of the Russian post office in Kuybyshevo, followed by the address in separatist Donbass with no mention of either Ukraine or the people’s republics. An unremarkable Russian village just one kilometer away from the Ukrainian border, Kuybyshevo thus became an unwitting international postal sorting center. Every Tuesday, a truck crosses the border from Ukraine, picks up the packages and heads back to separatist Donbass. The Russian post knows about it, of course, and looks away.
But another aspect of this story is how these institutions forcibly seized by the Moscow-backed separatist groups back in 2014 have failed in their attempts to replace the Ukrainian institutions: the emblem of the “Post of Donbass” (a double-headed eagle on a blue background) might be near-identical to the one used by their Russian counterpart, but two people living in Donetsk told me last week the separatist post was considered by locals slow and unreliable. Private couriers might be illegal and much more expensive — prices shot up because of the coronavirus pandemic and the closure of the crossing points into Ukraine —, but they work.
Hi and everyone and welcome to this issue of Eastern Radar, put together from an uncomfortable seat in the Amsterdam airport. This will be the last issue for this year — I hope you’ve enjoyed the newsletter so far, and that you’ll be able to take some rest before 2021 truly kicks in. As for me, I’m looking forward to bringing you more cool stories from Eastern Europe. Merry Christmas and happy new year!
Beeps
🤵 Vladimir Poutine talked for close to five hours during his traditional press conference but did not mention climate change once.
🚢 The Russian nuclear-powered cargo ship "Sevmorput" bound for Antarctica has been forced to turn back after sustaining damage and will bypass Europe in a few days.
💩 As Uzbekistan’s government failed to prepare for the heating season, locals are forced to burn dung to power their stoves.
✝️ A Ukrainian start-up released an app to make it easier for people to find the graves of their ancestors and “digitize” cemeteries.
👋 A resident from the Russian city of Novosibirsk had to appear in court to prove she was alive and keep receiving her pension after a hospital mistakenly pronounced her dead.
🔋 41% of Latvia’s energy consumption came from renewables in 2019, the third-highest percentage in the EU.
Under the Radar
Nadezhda Mazakina | Fontanka | December 15
Nov 2019 (BBC): Russian historian found with body parts accused of murder
The accusation detailed what Sokolov did the day after the murder — he inquired about when the gas service would come to his flat, whether a letter of his had reached the French embassy, went to a store, prepared to meet guests, and then went to pick up a new mattress to replace the one bloodied by the remains that would later be found. He also called a friend in Sevastopol, suggesting he wire some money so that he could pay him back in cash next week in Petersburg. The transaction didn’t go through.
Earthsight | December 16
The largest illegal timber scam in Russia this century was recently revealed in the country's Far East. Earthsight found 100,000 tonnes of lumber linked to the scandal entered Europe. Timber giant BM Group plundered precious taiga forests home to brown bears, wolves and lynx. Boss Alexander Pudovkin now faces criminal charges of using bribes and corrupt deals to serve his business empire. Prosecutors say his botched sawmill venture illegally logged 600,000 cubic meters of wood, but european imports continued even after the scandal broke, including into Germany, France and Belgium
Pavel Gerasin | 7x7 | December 11
In 2017, a scandal broke out in a small city in the region of Bryansk, when a journalist from a local newspaper lost his accreditation to cover the city council. Members of the Association of European Journalists stood up for the journalist, and the publicity forced local officials to backtrack and give him a new accreditation. But this is the exception rather than the rule. Since the beginning of 2020, the Union of Journalists of Russia recorded 118 violations of the rights of Russian journalists, including attacks, threats, detentions at pickets, accusations of publishing fakes, and denial of accreditation. "7x7" magazine found typical cases of journalists being prevented from covering representative bodies.
Research, Culture & General Nerdistry
Gerhard Toews & Pierre-Louis Vezina | Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics | December 11
Enemies of the people were the millions of artists, engineers, professors, and affluent peasants that were thought a threat to the Soviet regime for being the educated elite, and were forcedly resettled to the Gulag, i.e. the system of forced labor camps across the Soviet Union. In this paper we look at the long-run consequences of this dark re-location episode. We show that areas around camps with a larger share of enemies among camp prisoners are more prosperous today, as captured by firms’ wages and profits, as well as night lights per capita. We also show that the descendants of enemies are more likely to be tertiary educated today. Our results point in the direction of a long-run persistence of education and a resulting positive effect on local economic outcomes.
Camp Russia: On Zakhar Prilepin’s “The Monastery”
Sarah Gear | Los Angeles Review of Books | December 18
Given his political stance, it is curious that Prilepin sees fit to write against the Soviet government in The Monastery, which doesn’t hide or justify any of the atrocities that took place in the camp. Prilepin explains this seeming dichotomy himself in the novel’s “Afterward” [sic]. In an attempt to shore up The Monastery’s historical credentials, he writes about a visit he had with camp commander Fiodor Eichmans’s daughter while researching the novel. In conversation with her, he explains that while he does not love the Soviet government, he absolutely hates people who speak against it.
Andrew Monaghan, Dmitry Adamsky, Michael Kofman, Pavel Sharikov | Russian Analytical Digest | December
The topic of this issue is “Russian Military Strategy.” In it, the authors challenge Western received wisdom about Russian strategy and aim to stimulate critical thinking. Andrew Monaghan critiques the West’s fixation on Russian hybrid warfare as outdated, while Dima Adamsky argues that Anti Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) is, contrary to Western conventional wisdom, nonexistent in the Russian lexicon. Michael Kofman unpacks these concerns further, questioning the scenarios for a Russian fait accompli in the Baltics envisioned by Western defense planning circles and challenging the claim that a Russian “fait accompli strategy” is even possible. Pavel Sharikov rounds out the issue by suggesting small steps that the US and Russia might take to enhance their cooperation on the nonmilitary use of cyberspace.
And also…
Podcasts about imperial Russia spying on China, Russian think tanks and whether there’s a “Russian blob” (in Russian), and how Russian and American travelers influenced the way each country sees the other; Beautiful and rare pictures of life in a Ukrainian village in the 60s and 70s; A Twitter thread commenting a recent New-York Times article about Russia “winning” the climate crisis