I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.
Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect some of the key developments in the country and in its war against Ukraine, and some of the takeaways going forward. To subscribe, click here.
A decade after a Russian missile shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over the war zone in Ukraine, Russia strikes a children’s hospital in Kyiv. NATO vows staunch support for Kyiv, but Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban undermines the message. And the Kremlin’s clampdown on dissent continues.
Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.
10 Years After
A decade ago, the war in the Donbas was three months old when something horrible happened: A passenger jet flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over the battle zone in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.
It was high summer, July 17, and many of the passengers were headed for vacation or to see relatives halfway around the world. There were 80 children among the dead.
In its immediate aftermath, the MH17 tragedy drew global attention to the conflict in the Donbas, where Russia had fomented unrest and was fully supporting anti-Kyiv forces, at times sending in troops to fight alongside them.
It generated expressions of outrage in the West and a hail of disinformation from Russia as President Vladimir Putin’s government sought to deflect blame for the downing of a civilian airliner in a war it falsely claimed to have little or no part in.
In February 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine turned that still-simmering war into the biggest armed conflict on the European continent since 1945.
Every day, Ukrainian children are among its victims.
That has been underscored repeatedly: When Russia bombed a theater in Mariupol where the word "children" was painted on the pavement outside to indicate that there were many children among those sheltering inside, for example.
When a 4-year-old girl was killed in a cruise missile strike on the west-central city of Vinnytsya, or when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin for “the war crime” of illegally transferring children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.
In 2016, an international investigation concluded that MH17 was shot down by a missile fired from a Russian Buk launcher that was brought into territory held by the anti-Kyiv forces and spirited back across the border into Russia shortly afterward.
Almost 10 years after the downing of MH17, a projectile that military analysts, open-source researchers, and Ukrainian authorities said was a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile struck the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv on July 8.
Shifting Blame
It killed two adults and wounded more than 50 people, including children, city and hospital officials said, and it disrupted vital surgery and other treatments and displaced patients, parents, and staff. Some of the children affected were being treated for wounds they suffered in previous Russian attacks.
As with MH17, a brief silence gave way to a host of false narratives, unsupported claims, and outright lies about what occurred.
The missile strike on the hospital came on the eve of a three-day NATO summit in Washington at which support for Ukraine in its defense against the Russian invasion was a central issue. The attack was widely condemned by Western leaders including U.S. President Joe Biden, who called it a "horrific reminder of Russia's brutality."
“While the useful idiots are rambling about peace with Putin, he is sending missiles to a children's hospital,” said Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky, who summoned the Russian ambassador on July 9 to deliver a message to Moscow: “Murderers who attack children in hospitals are the dregs of humanity.”
A stark exception to the chorus of condemnation, and a possible target of the first part of the Czech diplomat's comment, was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. He was on what he called a “peace mission” that included meetings with Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Chinese President Xi Jinping and -- late on July 11, after the NATO summit, with former U.S. President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in the November 5 election.
Orban, like Trump, has not detailed a proposal for peace, but his comments have suggested that, like a blueprint outlined by advisers to Trump and like others calling for talks, he believes that ending the war any time soon would require Ukraine to leave a substantial portion of its territory under Russian control.
If Orban’s actions and words pointed to rifts in the West over Russia's war against Ukraine, a visit by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi underscored ambivalence further afield.
Modi, whose country relies heavily on Russia for arms and oil, met with Putin on the day of the children’s hospital strike and waxed enthusiastic about ties in comments on social media.
Still in Moscow a day later, he said that "when innocent children are murdered, one sees them die, the heart pains and that pain is unbearable," but he did not mention the hospital strike or directly blame Putin or Russia for the war.
“It is a huge disappointment and a devastating blow to peace efforts to see the leader of the world's largest democracy hug the world's most bloody criminal in Moscow on such a day,” Zelenskiy wrote in a July 9 post on X that included photos of the aftermath of the strike on the hospital.
Modi also indicated he told Putin that “for the brighter future of our next generation, peace is of utmost importance.”
'Irreversible Path'
Such remarks, by Modi and others calling for a negotiated solution, may seem straightforward, but they fall far short of assigning responsibility for the continuing bloodshed to Russia. Putin, after all, has repeatedly said he’s open to peace talks -- it’s just that he has set preconditions that include, among other things, requiring Ukraine to cede five of its regions in their entirety and to stay out of NATO forever.
At the NATO summit in Washington, leaders backed what the main statement from the gathering called Ukraine's "irreversible path" to membership, saying that Kyiv has a right to choose its own security arrangements and that its "future is in NATO."
Ever since he launched the unprovoked invasion in 2022, a substantial part of Putin’s propaganda push involves portraying Kyiv and the West as the warmongers, even amid attacks like the strike on the children’s hospital.
Case in point: A July 11 report by the state news agency TASS that read, “NATO summit’s documents show that West stands against supporting peace – Kremlin.”
Some in the West, meanwhile, say the United States and Europe are doing too little to support Ukraine’s defense.
The Russian strike on the children’s hospital “provides yet another layer of evidence about the mindset of Putin and his determination to erase the culture, and indeed the very existence, of Ukraine,” Mick Ryan, a military analyst and retired Australian Army major general, wrote on Substack. “And it should provide further impetus for rethinking Western strategy about the war and a rapid elevation in the level of Western support to help Ukraine defeat Russia.”
The Clampdown
Amid the constant carnage of Russia’s war against Ukraine, as well as high-profile events such as the NATO summit, developments inside Russia may draw less attention than they otherwise would -- which may be how the Kremlin likes it.
But the unrelenting clampdown on dissent and anything that the state chooses to see as dissent has continued alongside the invasion.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2023 on a treason conviction stemming in part from comments in which he accused the "dictatorial regime in the Kremlin" of committing war crimes in Ukraine, was kept from seeing lawyers for a week this month, raising fears for his life.
Kara-Murza’s health is fragile following two severe bouts of illness that he suffered in Russia. He believes he was poisoned by the Russian security services over his opposition to Putin, and the FBI has investigated the matter "as a case of intentional poisoning."
This week, Russian authorities put Yulia Navalnaya on a wanted list and on a registry of “terrorists and extremists” shortly after she was elected to head the New York-based Human Rights Federation. Navalnaya has accused the Kremlin of murdering her husband, Aleksei Navalny, the opposition politician who was barred from challenging Putin in a 2018 presidential election and who died in unexplained circumstances in February at the Arctic prison where he was serving a 19-year sentence on an extremism conviction that he and his supporters say was politically motivated revenge for his activism.
On July 8, a Moscow court convicted theater director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriichuk of "justifying terrorism" and sentenced each to six years in prison over a play that opened last year about Russian women who married Muslim men and moved to Syria.
Supporters of Berkovich and Petriichuk say the charge is absurd and suspect they were targeted over criticism of the war in Ukraine.
On July 9, Nikolai Kolin, a shoemaker in Moscow was found guilty of financing terrorism and sentenced to 14 years in prison after allegedly sending sending 5,000 rubles ($57) to the Russian Volunteer Corps, which has fought alongside Ukrainian troops battling against the invasion.
Kolin’s prison term is twice as long as the sentence handed down to a former Wagner Group mercenary who was convicted of murdering a 32-year-old mother of three after returning home to the Far East region of Primorye from the war in Ukraine.
The former mercenary, whose name was not released to the public, had reportedly been recruited by Wagner from prison. A rash of violent crimes committed by former inmates sprung from prison to fight in Ukraine has left civilians fearful of returnees from the war.
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, Spotify, Pocket Casts).
Yours,
Steve Gutterman
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