Russia Watch Thread

[weatheriscool]

U.S. targets Abramovich plane, 99 others over Russia export violations
Source: reuters.com

The U.S. Commerce Department on Friday moved to effectively ground 100 airplanes that have recently flown to Russia and are believed to violate U.S. export controls, including a plane used by Russian businessman Roman Abramovich.

The list includes 99 Boeing airplanes operated by Russian passenger and cargo carriers including Aeroflot, AirBridge Cargo, Utair, Nordwind, Azur Air and Aviastar-TU -- as well as Abramovich's Gulfstream G650 -- and could further hinder Russian efforts to continue some international flights.

....

The Commerce Department warned companies and other entities around the world that any refueling, maintenance, repair, or spare parts or services violate U.S. export controls and subject companies to U.S. enforcement actions that could include "substantial jail time, fines, loss of export privileges, or other restrictions," the department said.

The department said in a statement the action means "international flights from Russia on these aircraft are effectively grounded." Officials told Reuters said it could also prevent domestic Russia flights because of U.S. enforcement actions that could target companies servicing planes in Russia.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/exclusive ... 022-03-18/

[weatheriscool]

France freezes Russian Central Bank's assets
Source: uawire.org

... French authorities have frozen 22 billion euros of the Russian Central Bank, as well as the accounts and real estate of individuals who fell under the sanctions, said on the air of the radio station RTL the French Minister of Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire.

According to him, real estate belonging to about 30 Russian oligarchs with a total value of half a billion euros has been seized.

Earlier, the Dutch authorities froze Russian assets worth more than 200 million euros (about $ 220 million) due to sanctions. .....

Read more: https://www.uawire.org/france-freezes-r ... k-s-assets

[caltrek]

I just thought that I would pass along this observation:

The Ex-Kremlin Deputy Who Openly Opposed the War in a Mother Jones Exclusive Has Been Forced to Resign
by Daniel King
March 18, 2022

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... utins-war/

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) The former top Russian official who broke ranks with Kremlin leaders by condemning his country’s invasion of Ukraine in a recent Mother Jones interview has been forced out as chair of a prominent foundation for innovation and technology. The sudden resignation by Arkady Dvorkovich from the Skolkovo Foundation, announced today, follows demands for his “immediate dismissal in disgrace” by Russia’s Secretary of the General Council Andrei Turchak, who accused him of “national betrayal” for publicly rebuking the war.

Dvorkovich, who is president of the International Chess Federation (FIDE), had told me, “Wars are the worst things one might face in life…My thoughts are with Ukrainian civilians.” Within a day of our interview’s publication, senior party officials called for his ouster. “Do you think you can hide behind a chessboard…” asked the head of Russia’s space program, ex-NATO ambassador, and hard-line Putin ally Dmitry Rogozin, who is a former deputy prime minister of defense.

Dvorkovich is one of the very few, or only, recent top Kremlin officials to openly oppose the war: “Wars do not just kill priceless lives. Wars kill hopes and aspirations, freeze or destroy relationships and connections,” he had told me from Russia, where he said he was “safe with my family and friends.”

Turchak claimed Dvorkovich “took the side of the enemy” by criticizing the war. “He has made his choice,” Turchak said. “This is nothing but the very national betrayal, the behavior of the fifth column, which the president spoke about today.”

Vladimir Putin on Wednesday delivered a televised warning to anyone opposing his invasion of Ukraine, calling antiwar Russians “bastards and traitors” to be purged. His mandate has materialized. Rogozin had called Dvorkovich a “son of a bitch” for speaking out in Mother Jones, and Turchak said the “self-cleansing of society” must include Dvorkovich’s sacking as chair of the Skolkovo Foundation, the prestigious center that develops and commercializes advanced technologies.

[Maximus]

Russian bond yields spike as trading resumes after month-long pause

Some Russian assets returned to trading on Monday after almost a month on the sidelines, with bidding on OFZ government bonds open for limited hours on the Moscow Exchange.

The Central Bank of Russia announced on Friday that trading in federal loan bonds would resume on a discrete auction basis between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. Moscow time on Monday, and in the usual format between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m (10 a.m. and 2 p.m. GMT). Trading in such instruments had been halted for three weeks.

Yields on the benchmark 10-year OFZ ruble treasury bonds spiked to 19.7% in early pre-market trade, an all-time high, but had settled to around 14% by the end of the trading session.

The Russian stock market has been closed since Feb. 25 as stocks plummeted in light of the invasion and subsequent barrage of Western economic sanctions. The CBR has yet to confirm when equity trading can resume, as a backlog of transactions will need to be cleared. However, a number of additional financial market operations will be allowed to resume over the next two weeks

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/21/russian ... pause.html

[wjfox]

Alexei Navalny faces 13 more years in jail after court finds him guilty of fraud

Tue 22 Mar 2022 09.36 GMT

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been found guilty of large-scale fraud and contempt by a Russian court.

The move on Tuesday means that Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic, is likely to face a substantial extension to his jail sentence.

He is already serving a two-and-a-half year sentence at a prison camp east of Moscow for parole violations related to charges he says were fabricated to thwart his political ambitions.

A further 13 years could now be added due to the latest criminal case against him, which he has also dismissed as politically motivated.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... jail-fraud

[weatheriscool]

Putin critic Navalny found guilty of fraud by Russian court
Source: The Hill

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Tuesday was found guilty of fraud by a Russian court.

In a case that Navalny says is politically motivated, the Russian government could potentially give the prominent Kremlin critic another 13 years in prison on top of the 30-month sentence he received in 2021, Reuters reported.

Prosecutors have recommended Navalny to go to a maximum-security penal colony.

He was found guilty on charges of fraud and contempt of court. The government accused him of embezzling funds for himself and his organization.

Read more: https://thehill.com/policy/internationa ... -in-russia

[wjfox]

EU signs US gas deal to curb reliance on Russia

22 minutes ago

The US and the EU have announced a major deal on liquified natural gas, in an attempt to reduce Europe's reliance on Russian energy.

The agreement will see the US provide the EU with at least 15 billion additional cubic metres of the fuel - known as LNG - by the end of the year.

[...]

The longer-term aim is to ensure, until at least 2030, about 50 billion cubic metres per year of US gas, up from last year's 22 billion cubic metres.

[...]

President von der Leyen said: "We want, as Europeans, to diversify away from Russia towards suppliers that we trust that are friends and that are reliable."

She pointed out that the target 50 billion cubic metres per year "is replacing one-third already of the Russian gas going to Europe today. So we are right on track now to diversify away from Russian gas."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60871601

[Xyls]

Wat

[caltrek]

This Troubled Silence—In Russia We Don’t Talk About War or Politics
by an author who is kept anonymous to protect him or her from potential reprisals
March 23, 2020

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... -politics/

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) Things are quiet here in St. Petersburg. Weirdly, horrendously, quiet. Like there isn’t a war on at all.

The city is home to military and navy academies. Home to the massive state-owned energy corporation Gazprom, home to the Constitutional Court. It’s the old imperial capital and Putin’s hometown. It is quite capable of patriotic jingoism. But things are quiet.

On February 24, Russian military forces began shelling Ukrainian cities. The following week, billboards appeared around the city with the letter “Z” and the phrase “We do not forsake our own!” This letter “Z” then began to appear on riot police helmets and Rosgvardia cars. I’ve seen metro workers wear it tacked to their uniforms. Asked whether they are required to do so, some look up defiantly and say, “Unfortunately, yes.” I rarely, however, see this letter “Z” on private cars around town.
…
On February 24, when Russian armored vehicles rolled into Ukraine, they were marked with large white letters, either Z or V: marks to distinguish forces and avoid friendly fire. The most reasonable explanation for these markings is that Z stands for Zapad or West, V for Vostok, or the East, which signifies the two directions from which the vehicles entered Ukraine. But why were they written in the Latin alphabet? And why has the Z become the official symbol of this “special military operation” that may not legally be called a war? The Russian Ministry of Defense eschews easy answers. On March 2, it explained to its Instagram followers that “Z signifies Za Pobedu!” On March 15, the governor of St. Petersburg was formally briefed with this same explanation.

Official explanations are asinine. The symbols are empty, disconnected from any reasonable semantic content. But this irrationality is not without reason. The helmets of the riot cops beating Russian anti-war protesters bear the same senseless mark as that which adorns armored vehicles decimating Ukrainian cities and towns. The Russian state has marked this violence as two fronts of one war.

The article goes on to discuss that peculiar form of denialism that is now prevalent in Russia, along with some apparently genuine disgust felt by others toward Putin and the war.

[caltrek]

The article linked below starts off with a discussion of the U.S. pledge to take in 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. In then goes on to make some brief points about Russia that I have cited below.

U.S. to Step Up Sanctions on Russia
by Cain Burdeau
Maech 24, 2022

https://www.courthousenews.com/us-to-ta ... on-russia/

Extract:

(Courthouse News) “Look, if you’re Putin and you think that Europe is going to crack in a month or six weeks or two months – they can take anything for another month,” Biden said about Russia’s ability to withstand sanctions. “We have to stay fully, totally, thoroughly united.”

He said sanctions were not going to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from his invasion of Ukraine, but that they must be seen as “increasing the pain.”
...
Despite suffering major setbacks and casualties, Russia possesses a far superior army than Ukraine’s and Putin is enjoying a lot of public support for the war with polls indicating that more than 70% of Russians are backing him.

Still, if the Ukraine war carries on for months with high Russian casualties Putin’s hold on power could be at risk. Western experts talk about Russia getting bogged down in the kind of war the Red Army fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a defeat that played a role in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

“Many Russian tsars were killed,” said Andrei Kozyrev, a former Russian foreign minister under President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, told the Times newspaper recently. “Many were dismissed one way or the other. Even in the Soviet Union, there were ways; Stalin was said to have been poisoned, Khrushchev was just escorted out of the Kremlin. With Putin, I very much expect there to be resistance growing and discontent growing that will be resolved one way or another. I don’t know which way but Russian history is full of unexpected outcomes.”

[raklian]

Biden says Putin ‘cannot remain in power’ in sweeping speech on Russian invasion of Ukraine

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/26/biden-s ... raine.html

President Joe Biden on Saturday said Russian leader Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” over his invasion of Ukraine.

In a sweeping speech in Poland that marked the finale of a three-day trip to Europe, Biden urged democracies around the world to unify against Russia and commit to a historic battle against authoritarian aggression.

Biden directly and repeatedly condemned Putin throughout the speech, accusing the Russian president of “using brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control.”

I suppose the practical significance of this is Russia will have to remove Putin if it wants to resume normal relations with the West.

If I might add, I seriously hope Putin won't use this as a pretext to use chemical/nuclear weapons because President Biden stating "Putin must be removed" constitutes an existential threat to Russia.

[Xyls]

Honestly, Biden is in many ways as bad as Trump for gaffes that make situations worse. He should STFU.

[caltrek]

One of the Last American Journalists in Moscow Recounts How She Escaped Russia as Putin’s New Iron Curtain Fell.
by Michele A. Berdy
March 27, 2022

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... n-00020470

Extract:

(Politico) I work at The Moscow Times, an independent newspaper founded in 1992 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union that publishes online in both English and Russian.
...
I hadn’t set out to spend my life in Moscow. After graduating from college in 1978, I came to Moscow to continue studying Russian and become a translator. Except for a few years in the 1980s, I’ve lived there ever since. I worked as a translator and interpreter, as a field producer and reporter in television journalism, a manager of non-profit communication programs, and at The Moscow Times newspaper for almost 20 years. I write a column about Russian language and culture, and since 2015 I’ve been the arts editor.
...
On our morning walks with our dogs, my friends talked about everything but the war — I don’t know why. Did they believe, as one neighbor said when the sanctions began, that “Biden just won’t let us live in peace” and didn’t want to offend me by criticizing my president? Or did they mistrust me? To my shame, I had a flashback of Soviet-era fear, remembering when friends or colleagues could denounce you to the authorities. I talked about television shows and the weather, just in case.

The strangest part of that last week was the sense of navigating between two realities. There was my reality of a brutal war being waged against Ukraine and foreigners making frantic travel plans. And then there was my neighbors’ televised reality of children handing flowers to Russian soldiers in the warring republics of the Donbas, thanking them for saving them from genocidal Ukrainians. In their reality, NATO was bombing Russian soldiers and the “drug addicted, neo-Nazi” leadership of Ukraine was being run by the Americans. Once someone laughed about “fake” videos of Kyiv being bombed — “as if we could do anything like that.”

I only discussed my situation with one neighbor, who had hurriedly sent her college-age son out of the country and had begun making plans to leave with her daughter. She hadn’t told anyone at work or in the neighborhood that she was leaving. “You never know,” she said on the stairs, rapping her knuckles on the handrail in the old Soviet code that meant an informant.

[raklian]

Update #1:

[weatheriscool]

'We will come and we will find you': U.S. issues warning to anyone helping Russia bypass sanctions
Source: CNBC

The U.S. will hold accountable any actor that seeks to help Russia bypass economic sanctions amid the Kremlin's unprovoked onslaught on Ukraine, Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told CNBC on Tuesday.

The U.S. and international allies have imposed a barrage of punitive measures against Russia since the country launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.

The conflict has triggered a devastating humanitarian crisis, sent shock waves through financial markets and left Russia increasingly isolated on the global stage.

"We have not seen to date that Russia has been able to evade our sanctions in a meaningful way, but we know that they are attempting to do so and we know they are going to try and use every means possible," Adeyemo told CNBC's "Street Signs Europe."

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets ... ar-AAVC9ZC

[weatheriscool]

Putin humiliated as Ukraine publishes list of 600 Russian spies - 'DB9's and 007' exposed

By James Lee

With the invasion of Ukraine now entering its fourth week, Putin has suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of Ukrainian resistance, as well as signs of discontent from within. Such is the paranoia surrounding Putin, multiple Russian FSB spies have been placed under house arrest through fear of a coup against him. The move appeared to be a reprisal for detailed plans of Russia’s invasion being obtained and disclosed by Western intelligence agencies.

The list revealed by Ukrainian sources details passport information, phones numbers as well as personal habits, including driving and drinking patterns.

According to the leaked information, one agent has a Skype address that includes “jamesbond007” and another has the characters “DB9” in reference to the fictional MI6 officers' much-coveted Aston Martin.

Another agent is reported to be obsessed with premium cars, whilst another is a heavy drinker who “systematically violates traffic regulations.”

Officials in Ukraine have accused the agents of being involved in criminal activities across Europe.

More: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/15 ... ce-failure

[Member]

'We will come and we will find you': U.S. issues warning to anyone helping Russia bypass sanctions

Including China?

[weatheriscool]

Russian supply chains next in line for sanctions, deputy U.S. treasury secretary says
Source: Reuters

LONDON, March 29 (Reuters) - The United States and its allies plan new sanctions on more sectors of Russia's economy that are critical to sustaining its invasion of Ukraine, including supply chains, Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said on Tuesday.

Adeyemo, speaking in London on a European trip to consult with allies on strengthening and enforcing sanctions to punish Russia, said the broadening of those efforts was aimed at undermining "the Kremlin's ability to operate its war machine".

"In addition to sanctioning companies in sectors that enable the Kremlin's malign activities, we also plan to take actions to disrupt their critical supply chains," Adeyemo told an event at the think tank Chatham House.

"Our goal is to use an integrated approach that includes export controls which will bite over time and sanctions that will bite immediately," he said, adding they would also target alternative military suppliers used by Russia.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/business/us-all ... 022-03-29/

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

https://news.writecaliber.com/financial ... -payments/

"Russia proposes SWIFT alternative to India for Ruble payments"

Russia wants to use its SWIFT alternative, SPFS, for India to pay for Russian oil which will be in INR using CNY as the reference currency. Too bad Russia cannot work PRC's credit card alternative UnionPay into this deal or else this deal pretty has all of Russia's counter-sanctions moves into one.