The Week In Russia: Blue Balloons, Blood Feuds, And A Trial In Chechnya

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The Kremlin shrugs at the top Chechen legislator's "blood feud" threat against a blogger, while a top human rights activist in Chechnya faces a verdict in a drug-possession trial denounced as a "tragic farce." There was a touch of farce in Moscow, too, where activists said police classified blue balloons held by protesters at a 15,000-strong rally for Internet freedom as "pilotless flying vehicles" and detained the demonstrators handing them out.

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

Be Afraid

When Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked about the Chechen parliament speaker's declaration of a "blood feud" targeting a dissident blogger who is in hiding in Poland, his response was telling: He said there is no such thing as a blood feud in Russian law.

Well, exactly.

Magomed Daudov's threat, and the nonresponse from President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, underscore Chechnya's status as an anomaly in a country often portrayed as being buttoned under Putin's tight control.

Since 2007, when Putin installed Ramzan Kadyrov at age 30, he has run the region in the North Caucasus as his own and played largely by his own rules -- both inside Chechnya and sometimes beyond its borders.

Kadyrov and his allies sometimes call those rules Islamic law, as Daudov did during the March 12 Instagram Live broadcast in which he delivered what its recipient, the blogger Tumso Abdurakhmanov, called a "veiled threat" that "we will find you and kill you, punish you, kill you."

After Abdurakhmanov called Kadyrov a traitor, Daudov declared the blogger "an enemy to me and my brothers." While he said he would not kill Abdurakhmanov, he added: "From now on, when you go to bed, make sure that you lock the door with a key. When you go outside, be vigilant. If you get a kick in the back, know that it's no accident."

One might think that such a warning, coming from the top lawmaker in one of the 83 regions of the Russian Federation, is the kind of thing that might embarrass Putin, who as president is the guarantor of the Russian Constitution. He would never admit being embarrassed about it, though -- as Peskov's noncomment comment made clear -- so it's hard to know and does not really matter.

A Killing Near The Kremlin

But in some ways, it seems like quite the opposite: that the Kremlin uses Chechnya's unofficial special status -- its reputation, steeped in centuries of conflict with the Russian state and furthered by the late author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as a wild place whose people will not knuckle under to authority -- to distance itself from such incidents while doing little or nothing to stop them.

For instance, take the killing of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead on a bridge near the Kremlin on February 27, 2015.

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Russians Pay Tribute To Nemtsov Outside Kremlin

In 2017, five men from Chechnya were sentenced to prison for his murder, but relatives and government critics have voiced suspicion that the culprits will never face justice because an honest investigation could lead too close to Kadyrov or to Putin.

After the killing, Kadyrov deflected attention away from himself -- and from Moscow, the Kremlin, and Putin -- with an Instagram post in which he portrayed the Chechen convicted as the triggerman, Zaur Dadayev, as a pious Muslim who was incensed at the controversial depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The implication being, of course, that the killing was a personal thing, a matter of faith and fiery convictions, and that there was no need to look for a mastermind in Moscow or anywhere else.