Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what's ahead.

Nearly a decade after the downing of MH17, a military transport plane that Moscow says was carrying 65 Ukrainian POWs crashes in a region bordering Ukraine. Meanwhile, one of the Russians convicted of murder in a Western court over the MH17 disaster is sentenced in Russia – but not for that crime.

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

10 Years, Two Crashes

When a passenger jet carrying 298 people blew to pieces in the air over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, there was a flood of disinformation and competing claims about the case, but the facts ultimately came to light.

MH17 was shot down by a missile from a Russian launcher that was brought into territory held by Moscow-backed anti-Kyiv forces three months into the Donbas war and spirited back into Russia shortly afterward.

It’s unclear how much the world will ever know for sure about a plane crash on the other side of the border on January 24, when a Russian military transport jet slammed into the ground in the Belgorod region.

Russia said that there were 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war on board, along with six crew members and three guards. It said there were no survivors, something that footage of the fiery crash strongly supported.

But the veracity of some of Russia’s other assertions about the plane – such as the claim that it was carrying POWs and the claim that it was shot down by Ukraine -- may never be established.

Why not?

For one thing, unlike MH17, the Il-76 crashed in Russia. There is zero chance that Moscow will heed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s call for an international investigation -- with the possible exception of a scenario in which the Kremlin would agree to such a probe for the purpose of imagery but set about to thwart it in various ways.

Claims And Blame

If any of Russia’s main claims about the crash is shown to be false, the whole narrative – the assertion that Ukraine killed its own citizens in a reckless attack on Russia -- would fall apart.

The Russian narrative would be severely undermined if Kyiv’s claim that Moscow had not given Ukraine proper notification of the flight in advance, as it said has been done for previous prisoner swaps, proves to be accurate. That would suggest that Russia – deliberately or negligently – put the plane and everybody on board at risk of a Ukrainian attack.

Regardless of the cause, there are obviously many differences between the Il-76 crash and the downing of MH17, which killed all 298 passengers and crew on board the commercial flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur – men, women, and children from the Netherlands and nine other countries.

One difference is that while a single, coherent Russian narrative took shape very soon after the crash this week, Russia presented an array of sometimes conflicting claims and insinuations after MH17 crashed in an area held by Russia-backed forces.

Eventually, they all fell apart. In terms of efforts to bring people involved in the shoot-down to justice, the main results so far are the murder convictions and life sentences handed down in absentia to two Russians and one pro-Moscow Ukrainian separatist by a Dutch court in November 2022.

That ruling came nine months after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine – which, in turn, followed almost eight years of war fomented by Moscow in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The downing of MH17 drew the world’s attention to the Donbas war, which had started three months earlier.

Given the enormity of the war in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion -- the biggest in Europe since 1945 -- the events of 2014 can seem distant and are sometimes forgotten, despite their direct link to the current phase of the conflict.

'Cowardly Mediocrity'

But a key figure in Russia’s seizure of Crimea and the start of the Donbas war was in the news again this week: Igor Girkin, who is one of the two Russians convicted of murder by the Dutch court for the downing of MH17.

Girkin, who was better known at the time by his made-up name, Strelkov, was convicted by a Russian court on January 25 – not in absentia this time, as he has taken refuge from international justice in Russia – and sentenced to four years in prison.

But not for MH17.

Girkin -- a Russian nationalist who supports Russia’s war on Ukraine but has criticized the way Putin has waged it, calling him a “nonentity” and a person of “cowardly mediocrity” -- was convicted of making public calls for extremist activities.

The conviction was a signal to other nationalist hawks whose criticism of the Kremlin comes from the opposite side as that of the much-persecuted liberal opposition. It suggested that Putin felt it could be dangerous to leave Girkin without punishment.

But the relatively moderate statute and sentence may indicate that the Kremlin does not want to come down on Russians who are in favor of aggression against Ukraine.

The Clampdown

By contrast, critics who oppose the war have received longer sentences – in some cases much longer.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, an opposition politician who accused what he called the “dictatorial regime in the Kremlin” of committing “war crimes” in Ukraine shortly after the full-scale invasion, was convicted of treason and sentenced 25 years in prison last April.

The trials of Kara-Murza and other critics of the war are part of a clampdown that has intensified in the last decade and has been ramped up still further by the state since February 2022.

The state has targeted opposition activists, civil society, independent media, and all forms of dissent – and in some cases, Western journalists.

Alsu Kurmasheva, an RFE/RL journalist and dual U.S.-Russian citizen who was prevented from leaving Russia last June and was arrested in October, spent her 100th day behind bars on January 25.

Kurmasheva has been charged with failing to ask the Russian government to register her as a “foreign agent” and of spreading falsehoods about the Russian military. She and RFE/RL deny the charges – which carry maximum prison terms of five and 10 years, respectively -- and say Moscow is punishing her for her journalistic work.

One day later, a Moscow court denied a request for U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal correspondent held in pretrial detention since March 2023 on an espionage charge that he, the newspaper, and the U.S. government reject, to be released to house arrest. He could be sentenced to 20 years in prison if convicted.

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

Yours,

Steve Gutterman

P.S.: Consider forwarding this newsletter to colleagues who might find this of interest. Send feedback and tips to newsletters@rferl.org.

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what's ahead. To receive The Week In Russia newsletter in your inbox, click here.

It’s been three years since Aleksei Navalny’s arrest and almost two since Russia launched an invasion aimed at subjugating Ukraine. Price woes and protests puncture the veneer of stability as an election set to hand President Vladimir Putin six more years in the Kremlin draws closer.

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

Airport Arrest

Three years ago this week, opposition politician Aleksei Navalny returned to Russia after recovering abroad from a near-fatal nerve-agent poisoning he blames on President Vladimir Putin -- and was quickly detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.

He has been behind bars ever since, and last month was shipped off to a harsh prison above the Arctic Circle to serve a 19-year sentence following convictions on extremism and other charges that he and supporters say are Kremlin-engineered punishment for his political activity.

Anniversaries are arbitrary, of course. But a glance back provides a glimpse of what Putin may have hoped Russia, the region, and even the world would look like today: A Russia in which dissent does not exist, a world in which Moscow controls Ukraine, keeps NATO defanged on its eastern flank, and -- through a variety of levers -- has a major say in matters across Europe and beyond.

The Russian state had been cracking down increasingly hard on the opposition and independent voices for over a decade -- since Putin’s decision to return to the presidency in 2012 after a stint as prime minister became one of the catalysts for a wave of peaceful street protests in 2011-2012.

But Navalny’s arrest on January 17, 2021, marked the start of a new phase in the Kremlin’s clampdown on dissent -- one that kicked into overdrive with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine the following winter, on February 24, 2022.

Navalny’s return to Russia was not inevitable: It seems likely that once he was airlifted to Germany for lifesaving treatment following the poisoning in Siberia in August 2020, the Kremlin wanted him to remain abroad.

But he did return. And there’s speculation that the intensified clampdown that ensued -- encompassing Navalny’s associates and his now-outlawed political network across Russia but also targeting civil society, independent media, and all forms of dissent both real or perceived -- was part of a concerted effort by the state to erase potential sources of opposition to an invasion that was already being planned or at least considered by Putin and his close confidants.

'Impossible To Achieve'

Whether or not that’s the case, once it launched the large-scale invasion, the Russian state also turned the screws even tighter at home, using increasingly repressive legislation to silence criticism as it set about seeking to subjugate Ukraine.

Putin apparently thought that goal could be achieved within days or weeks -- a massive miscalculation.

“[T]he Russian government’s objectives were unrealistic from the start and impossible to achieve almost as soon as the fighting started,” Ruth Deyermond, a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London,” wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on December 31.

Nearly two years later, the war grinds on. Each side has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, but neither has made a substantial advance in recent months along the 1,200-kilometer front line running through eastern and southern Ukraine.

Russia controls Crimea and substantial parts of four other Ukrainian regions -- in all, about 20 percent of the country. Moscow had already held much of that territory before the full-scale invasion, however, and over the course of 2022 its forces retreated from much of the land they had taken in the initial onslaught.

Meanwhile, Russian war goals such as establishing a pro-Moscow government in Kyiv and ending NATO military activity in Eastern Europe -- a reversal of some of the main results of the Cold War and the Soviet Union’s collapse -- are further from reach than they were before February 2022.

The War At Home

Domestically, the Kremlin seems to have made more progress toward its apparent goals -- at least when it comes to suppressing dissent.

The government has gutted civil society, outlawing or ordering the closure of such respected outfits as the Moscow Helsinki Group and Memorial, a highly respected human rights and historical truth advocacy group. It has chased opposition politicians and independent media outlets out of the country. It has persecuted LGBT Russians, stepping up restrictive laws and declaring what it describes as the "international LGBT social movement" an extremist organization. It has jailed prominent Kremlin opponents for years on what critics say are woefully unjust charges of treason, extremism, and other crimes. Lesser-known Russians who oppose the war have also been imprisoned for years -- like Aleksandra Skochilenko, a St. Petersburg artist who received a seven-year sentence for replacing tags in a grocery store with information about the invasion of Ukraine.

There were no major anti-war or anti-Kremlin protests in 2023, and Russia has weathered Western sanctions imposed over the invasion more successfully than many expected, at least for the time being.

But a wide array of incidents and developments has poked holes in the veneer of stability applied strenuously by the state, exposing potentially deepening problems as the country heads toward a March presidential election that, given the Kremlin’s sway over the media and its choke hold on politics nationwide, Putin is certain to win barring some massively unexpected development.

Last summer, Putin faced a major challenge when Wagner mercenary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin staged a mutiny in late June, accusing Russia of mishandling the war against Ukraine, and his forces marched to within 200 kilometers of Moscow before a murky agreement ended their advance. Prigozhin was killed two months later in a plane crash that many believe was a Kremlin-organized assassination, but the mutiny pointed up problems posed by his decision to invade Ukraine and by the continuing war.

Colossal Costs

The cost of the war to Russian citizens is colossal, ranging from economic problems to the death of family members at the front and a surge in violent crimes committed by former inmates who have been pardoned and released in exchange for fighting in Ukraine, among other effects.

Both the Wagner mutiny and high casualty count underscore the consequences of a war that will require hundreds of thousands more soldiers unless it is halted soon, something that seems highly unlikely. Demonstrations by Russians who want their relatives to be sent home from the front point up potential political troubles for Putin if he orders another military call-up like the massive mobilization he decreed in September 2022, which prompted many to flee the country.

More mundane problems also plague Russia.

At an end-of-the-year press conference and question-and-answer session that was televised live in December, Putin began with an glowing assessment of the economy, as he often does, but later found it necessary to apologize for the high price of eggs, a reflection of inflationary pressure on Russians’ pocketbooks.

In the New Year, cold winter weather and crumbling infrastructure have combined to cause dangerous water-main breaks, power cuts, and heating problems in a country that the Kremlin has put on a war footing at the expense of quality of life for its citizens.

And while protests are rare, thousands of people rallied repeatedly this week in the Bashkortostan region in defense of Fail Alsynov, the former leader of a now-banned group that advocated for the rights of ethnic Bashkirs and the preservation of their language and culture.

On January 17, police forcibly dispersed a protest outside the courthouse where Alsynov was convicted of inciting hatred and sentenced to four years in prison in a trial that followed an investigation initiated by the Kremlin-backed regional leader, Radiy Khabirov.

Activists from the Bashkir community and other minority groups in Russia say the Kremlin and regional governments are violating their rights and have increasingly sought to marginalize their languages and cultures.

Navalny, three years after his airport arrest, was characteristically defiant and upbeat.

“Putin’s state is not viable” and eventually “will collapse and crumble,” he said in a thread on his X account. “One day we will look at its place and it will be gone.”

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site, or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

Yours,

Steve Gutterman