Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

Editor's Note: To receive Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia each week via e-mail, subscribe by clicking here.

A Kremlin-connected tycoon is handed a contract to help fight corruption, while Vladimir Putin is handed a dog in Serbia and his spokesman portrays the president as a superhuman "workaholic" whose tireless labor keeps Russia running like a blast furnace. Meanwhile, a report claims far more Russians are leaving the country than official statistics suggest.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

A Not-So-Subtle Piece Of Trolling?

Roads, pipelines, Sochi infrastructure, a bridge to Crimea -- and anti-corruption conferences.

Wait, what?

That's right: Add civil-society development and combating corruption to the list of projects that companies controlled by billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, a childhood friend and former judo sparring partner of President Vladimir Putin, is reportedly getting paid by the Russian state to conduct.

SEE ALSO:

Putin-Connected Oligarch Wins Anticorruption Tender

At 46 million rubles, the equivalent of less than $700,000, the size of a grant awarded to Rotenberg's company Granat to hold meetings, discussions, and conferences on these issues pales in comparison to other projects the tycoon has been involved in, from infrastructure for the Sochi Olympics in 2014 to the bridge Russia has built to Crimea after seizing the peninsula from Ukraine later that year.

It is also seemingly further from the heart of Putin, who critics say has suppressed civil society and failed to tackle corruption over nearly 20 years in power -- during which Russia's graft problem has worsened by some measures.

But the reported contract raised eyebrows because, for some Russians and Russia-watchers, Rotenberg and his brother, Boris, are almost emblematic of one of the main problems holding back Russia and keeping its wealth gap high: the cozy, allegedly corrupt ties between the state and a relatively small circle of business leaders. In the current atmosphere, it seems almost like a not-so-subtle piece of trolling.

Disputed Islands

One could also be excused for wondering whether Russia has been trolling Tokyo in recent weeks by suggesting that it could cede two disputed islands just off Hokkaido to Japan -- and then toughening its rhetoric on the issue ahead of a meeting between Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has painstakingly sought a deal over the more than six years in which they have concurrently held power, on January 22.

​After the last Putin-Abe meeting, in November, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested that Moscow could hand over Shikotan and the Habomai islets -- the smaller of the four islands that Russia calls the Southern Kuriles and Japan calls the Northern Territories -- as part of the process.

He stipulated, however, that Japan must first "recognize the results of World War II" -- meaning that would have to accept Russia as the legal owner of all four islands, which the Soviet Union seized in the final days of the war. And since then, Lavrov and other officials have talked tough on the issue, accusing an enthusiastic Tokyo of getting ahead of itself and making unacceptable remarks.

• Amos Chapple

For Russia, they are the justly earned spoils of war. For Japan, the Kurile Islands are stolen territory, lost to Soviet aggression and Western interference. More than 70 years after the last shot was fired in World War II, the two countries remain locked in a stalemate over four wave-battered islands. (A version of this gallery was originally published in April 2017.)

As a result, a decades-o dispute that once again seemed closer to a resolution now seems -- once again -- maybe just as far.

The Russian pullback, if that's what it is, may have been pretty predictable. After all, Moscow has repeatedly dangled the prospect of a deal in front of Tokyo, but there's always a catch or three, whether stated outright or just hinted at: Recognize this, invest in that, tone down your military ties with Washington.

But the end result of the latest back-and-forth is unclear. Some observers say that Russia does want a deal that would include ceding the two smaller islands to Japan -- or should want one, at least

And the Kremlin has not ruled it out: In a wide-ranging, two-part interview with the newspaper Argumenty i Fakty, Putin's spokesman was given a chance to do just that but stopped short, saying only that the end result of "painstaking work" toward a peace treaty will "in no way violate the interest of our population."

'Blast Furnace'

But if Putin does hand over the islands, he will make every effort to somehow do it -- and to sell it -- in a way that will not undermine the image he has cultivated as the "gatherer of Russian lands."

He has already seen the wave of support that washed over him after the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 fade, even as the resultant Western ire and Western sanctions remain. So, while the windswept, sparsely populated islands don't compare with Crimea, which Putin claims is "holy land" for Russians, he will be sensitive to the potential risks of ceding them to Japan.

Speaking of Putin's image, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov applied a generous dollop of polish to it in the Argumenty i Fakty interview, which mixed hype and hagiography with remarks on policy.

Peskov portrayed Putin as a hale, hardworking leader who is something of a superhuman but is also close to the Russian people -- and does not need things like Facebook or one of its Russian equivalents, Odnoklassniki, to communicate with them.

Putin, Peskov said, is a "real workaholic" who does not look forward to Fridays because running Russia is a 24/7 job.

"The administration of the country is like a blast furnace that cannot be shut down," he said, and 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. is the "height of the workday" at the Kremlin.

Don't cross Putin, though. Asked whether the president curses, Peskov would not answer but said that "like any normal man" his boss sometimes expresses "his negative opinion of a person or process…in a way that will make your blood run cold."

'Advanced Geopolitical Dog Trolling'

Not all PR for Putin is so chilling, though: On multiple platforms, state media helped him show a softer side on a trip to Serbia on January 17, when he petted a dog he was given by his hosts as part of a warm and elaborate welcome that would be unlikely in most European capitals.

However warm and fuzzy, the gift gave off a whiff of "advanced geopolitical dog trolling," as one journalist put it. According the Russian state news agency RIA, which featured the dog prominently on its Twitter feed, the breed originates in Kosovo -- the former province of Serbia that, a decade after its declaration of independence and two decades after the war that made it possible, remains at the heart of tension between Belgrade and Moscow on one side and the West on the other.

Russia has suffered several setbacks in the former Yugoslavia in the past couple years, with Montengro joining NATO in 2017 -- after the authorities claimed to have thwarted a Russian-backed coup plot aimed at keeping it out of the Western military alliance -- and Macedonia is close to resolving a dispute with Greece that has blocked it from NATO and the European Union.

Embed share

Putin Arrives In Serbia For One-Day Visit

Embed share

The code has been copied to your clipboard.

---

width px height px

---

The URL has been copied to your clipboard

No media source currently available

0:00 0:01:11 0:00

With a highly visible church visit and a massive crowd of people coming out to see him -- some of them allegedly lured with promises of money, milk, sandwiches, and transport -- Putin is presumably happy with the optics of the visit, which included his 14th meeting with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in six years.

Heading For The Exit

After the talks, Putin delivered a predictable message on a reliable theme, blasting Kosovo's plans to transform its existing security force into a bigger, more powerful army.

But whether the visit brought the Kremlin closer to its goals in the Balkans is another matter.

"Polls have regularly shown that, while people do believe that Russia is a good friend to Serbia, not least of all over Kosovo, most Serbs do not believe that Russia is a shining example of the future they want," James Ker-Lindsay, a professor at the London School of Economics, said ahead of the visit.

SEE ALSO:

Serbian Officials Tuning Up For Putin's Visit To Belgrade

Some Russians seem to feel the same way -- many more than the state statistics agency's figures suggest, according to the independent media outlet Proyekt.

Although EU members said tens of thousands of Russians received a residence permit in 2017, the Russian state statistics service suggested that the number of Russians emigrating to these countries was six times lower.

The Proyekt report said that Rosstat acknowledged its numbers may be lower than the actual figures, explaining that many Russians who emigrate do not notify the authorities.

An apartment-building collapse killed 39 people on New Year's Eve in Magnitogorsk, and 13 revelers ringing in 2019 were injured when a bridge broke beneath their feet as the national anthem played in Moscow. Meanwhile, the new year brought a new wrinkle in relations with the West: The jailing of a dual U.S.-British citizen Russian authorities claim was caught spying.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Out With A Bang

The first year of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s new term has been bookended by disaster.

A week after he secured six more years in the Kremlin with a landslide victory that seemed assured before the first ballot was cast, a fire at a shopping mall in Siberia killed 64 people.

The raw numbers failed to describe the extent of the tragedy: That unspooled in the harrowing, heartbreaking stories that swiftly emerged, like that of 12-year-old Vika Pochankina -- trapped in a movie theater – asking her aunt by phone to “tell everyone that I loved them.”

“We’re burning. I love you. All,” 13-year-old Maria Moroz, who would die a day later in the hospital, wrote in a succession of posts from the theater.

With the Internet as a conduit of near-live accounts from desperate victims, the fire that swept through the Zimnyaya Vishnya (Winter Cherry) mall on March 25 stood out. But it was just the last in a long series of disasters – in the Putin era and before – caused or exacerbated by the corrosively deadly effects of negligence, carelessness, corruption, corner-cutting, and crumbling infrastructure.

Tragedy struck again on New Year’s Eve, when a whole section of a 10-story apartment building in the industrial Ural Mountains city of Magnitogorsk came crashing to the ground following a blast before dawn, trapping dozens of residents – some still living, some dead – in the ruins of their apartments.

Grim Search

Declaring that they had found all the victims, rescuers ended their search on January 3 with the death toll at 39 and the cause of the explosion still not certain.

Officials quickly said the likely cause of the blast was a gas leak -- as has often been the case in similar disasters in Russia in the past. Like deadly fires, apartment-block collapses have been a kind of grim signature of post-Soviet Russia: The deep pile of rubble, the fully intact apartments adjacent to the empty space where the neighbors used to live, the occasional piece of furniture or bathroom fitting hanging from a sheer wall high in the air.

And the meaning of “likely gas blast” is clear to all: “Not terrorism.” Because every time an explosion destroys an apartment block in Russia, the question is immediately: gas blast or terrorist bombing?

And that’s because of the bombings that ripped through four buildings in September 1999, killing about 300 people and helping usher in the second war against rebels in Chechnya.

Suspicious Minds?

The war helped Putin – the once-obscure official who was just weeks into his job as prime minister and still little-known after eight months as head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) – gain recognition and popularity on his rise to the top. Government critics accused the security services of staging the blasts as part of a plot to put Putin in the Kremlin.

Putin won his first presidential election the following March, after being abruptly handed Russia’s reins by Boris Yeltsin on December 31, 1999 – exactly 19 years before the blast in Magnitogorsk.

And nearly two decades later, there are still suspicions.

On January 1, two regional Russian media outlets cited unnamed sources as saying that the explosion might have been terrorism and that a van that caught fire nearby the next day, killing three people, was shot up by security forces seeking the suspects.

Bangs that sound like gunshots are heard on Internet-posted videos from the scene, but police said the van fire was caused by gas canisters. The Investigative Committee, meanwhile, responded to the reports with a statement late on January 1 saying that no traces of explosives had been found in the building fragments specialists had examined, but that authorities were looking into all possible causes.

'A Possible Scenario'

The committee released a similar statement on January 4, again making no mention of gas or any other likely cause. A day earlier, znak.com, one of the media outlets that ran the initial reports pointing to a possible attack -- issued a second report claiming that unnamed sources at the FSB in Moscow “confirm the theory of a terrorist act.”

The report could not be independently verified and included an unusual disclaimer saying that while the outlet trusts its sources, the information should “for now” be treated as “one of the possible scenarios” of the events in Magnitogorsk.

Among other things, the report cited sources as saying that a man who left the building shortly before the predawn blast "might be involved in extremist activity" -- an assertion that local police denied. It also said that there was a major manhunt in Novosibirsk overnight on January 1-2 and that a fourth person who had been in the van was killed in a rented apartment later on January 2.

Gorky Park

In some ways, little has changed in nearly 20 years: Some of the hallmarks of the early Putin era are hallmarks of what may or may not be the late Putin era.

In a less disastrous but even more symbolic incident, part of a pedestrian bridge in Moscow’s Gorky Park collapsed under the weight of a crowd at a New Year’s celebration. The accident – which occurred at almost exactly midnight, when the national anthem was playing – injured 13 people.

It was the latest in a series of bridge collapses in Russia – at least 20 since October 4, according to a list posted on Facebook.

For some, tragedies like Magnitogorsk are a big indictment of Putin, regardless of the cause – evidence that he has failed to eliminate, or even address, some of Russia’s most pressing problems.

The Kursk Disaster

But Putin does appear to have learned at least one lesson, if not after the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk in 2000 then after the Kemerovo shopping mall fire: When tragedy strikes, show up early.

It’s a lesson he didn’t learn after the Kursk went down after its own torpedoes exploded, killing all 118 seamen aboard while the navy searched for the stricken sub for hours and Putin turned a cold shoulder to Western offers of help for two days.

Like in Kemerovo but more slowly, devastating stories emerged from the deep – like that of an officer, huddled in a cramped compartment with 22 others who survived the blasts, scrawling a note and slipping it in his pocket: “None of us can get out.”

The botched rescue stoked anger among relatives of the victims as well as other Russians.

By contrast, Putin flew to Magnitogorsk a few hours after the predawn blast, visiting the site and speaking to injured victims in the hospital.

'The Lesson Of Kemerovo'

“Putin has learned the lesson of Kemerovo. That’s good,” Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Putin foe and former oil tycoon who spent 10 years in prison on charges he says were trumped up by the Kremlin and now lives in Europe, wrote on Twitter.

Even better, he added, would be for Putin “to understand that aging [housing] should be more important for the budget than ‘main Defense Ministry cathedrals’ and ‘biggest mosques in Europe’ – a reference to two costly, high-profile projects.

Meanwhile, some questioned Putin’s motives in making the trip to Magnitogorsk.

Alfred Kokh, a former deputy prime minister and privatization chief who also lives in Europe and is a vocal Kremlin critic, said that Putin’s swift arrival was one of the factors making him suspicious about the authorities’ accounts of the building collapse and the van fire.

More than 18 years after the sinking of the Kursk, and less than a year after the Kemerovo mall fire, there’s another potential motive for Putin’s change in approach.

In March, he was riding high, having just won a new term with nearly 77 percent of the vote. But polls conducted in the fall showed his approval rating and electability had declined, in part due to an unpopular pension reform that is raising the retirement age for Russians.

Putin does not have to worry about electability at the moment, if ever: He’s still in the first year of a six-year term and is barred by the constitution from seeking reelection in 2024, when he will turn 72.

But that uncertain future may be all the more reason to court the support of the public now.

Espionage Allegation

Another old problem that persists in the New Year is Russia’s deeply troubled relations with the West – the United States in particular.

Those ties were strained yet again with the arrest of Paul Whelan, a 48-year-old former U.S. Marine who Russian authorities say was caught “red-handed” on a spy mission.

His family says he was in Moscow for a wedding on December 28 – but he never made it, because he was detained earlier that day and later jailed at Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo detention center, where the Federal Security Service (FSB) keeps detainees.

Some observers say Russia probably arrested Whelan – a dual U.S. and British citizen -- in the hope of swapping him for Maria Butina, a Russian who pleaded guilty in a Washington, D.C., court in December to a charge of conspiring to act as a foreign agent.

Others disagreed – citing, among other things, the likelihood that Butina will be released within months and deported to Russia -- or said that while a swap is not likely, the arrest looked like retribution.

With the long Russian New Year’s and Orthodox Christmas holiday now in full swing, there has been very little official comment on Whelan’s case, and the FSB has given no detail at all about his alleged espionage.

So the public and the press must rely on a single Russian news agency citing a single unnamed source as saying that Whelan was detained in his room at the Metropol, a major hotel steps from the Kremlin, after receiving a USB stick containing a classified list of employees of an unspecified security agency.

Hostage Situation?

Whelan’s Russian lawyer has told media outlets that the Russian authorities have not shown him evidence of espionage on the part of his client, and U.S. intelligence experts have voiced doubt that he is a spy.

“In fact, his résumé suggests he’s perhaps the last person that the U.S. government would use to collect intelligence,” was how The Washington Post put it in a January 3 article, citing former intelligence officers.

Steven Hall, a retired former chief of Russia operations at the CIA, tweeted that “it’s most accurate to think of Whelan as a hostage.”

While he is reportedly in solitary confinement, he’s not alone in that sense: Most or all of the 24 Ukrainian sailors Russia arrested after firing on and seizing their naval craft near the Kerch Strait in late November are also jailed at Lefortovo.

NOTE: The Week in Russia will not be published on January 11. The next edition will appear on January 18.