Irina Borogan

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Russian Volunteer Corps fighters near Ukraine’s border with Russia, May 2023. Viacheslav Ratynskyi / Reuters

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The day after Russia’s presidential election in March, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a surprising speech. Having eliminated all viable political opposition, he had just sailed to victory by the highest margin in post-Soviet Russian history, garnering 88 percent of the vote. Yet rather than embracing his triumph—and his fresh mandate for a fifth term in office—he warned of an apparently grave threat facing the country: Russian defectors who have been joining the enemy in Russia’s two-year-old war in Ukraine.

Although their forces remain small, these Ukrainian-based Russian rebels have recently claimed responsibility for several attacks on Russian soil. In a speech delivered at his campaign headquarters, Putin compared these fighters to vlasovstsy, the name given to the Soviet soldiers who defected to the Nazi side during World War II—part of a movement that was considered one of the worst episodes of treason in Soviet history.…  Seguir leyendo »

A memorial to the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, St. Petersburg, Russia, February 2024. Stringer / Reuters

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The announcement on Friday that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in a remote Russian prison colony has left observers of the country in shock. For years, the most fearless critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the pervasive corruption of Putin’s inner circle, Navalny had been serving a draconian 19-year sentence for extremism. Indeed, it was highly unlikely that he would ever be released as long as Putin was in power. But apparently, even that was not enough. According to the Russian prison service, Navalny collapsed after a short walk in the prison yard and lost consciousness and died soon after.…  Seguir leyendo »

A partial solar eclipse and the Russian coat of arms in Moscow, October 2022. Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters

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In April 2023, a prominent Russian national with suspected ties to Russian intelligence pulled off an impressive escape from Italian authorities. Artem Uss, a Russian businessman and the son of a former Russian governor, had been detained in Milan a few months earlier on charges of smuggling sensitive U.S. military technology to Russia. According to an indictment issued by a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, in October 2022, Uss had illegally trafficked in the semiconductors needed to build ballistic missiles and a variety of other weapons, some of which were being used in the war in Ukraine. But while Uss was awaiting extradition to the United States, he was exfiltrated from Italy with the help of a Serbian criminal gang and returned to Russia.…  Seguir leyendo »

Patriarch Kirill and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, November 2019 Patriarch Kirill and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, November 2019. Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters

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On July 23, one of Ukraine’s largest churches, the Orthodox cathedral in Odessa, was seriously damaged by a Russian missile strike. The strike highlighted one of the lingering enigmas of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine: Moscow has been waging war not only on a neighboring population but also on one that, like its own, is overwhelmingly made up of Orthodox Christians. In effect, the Russian government has been forced to target its own religion in its campaign to subdue Ukraine. Yet despite this, members of Russia’s Orthodox clergy have been among the most vocal supporters of the war, and criticism from Orthodox leaders in other countries has been comparatively muted.…  Seguir leyendo »

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin in Moscow, April 2023. Yulia Morozova / Reuters

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In early May, tensions between the Russian Defense Ministry and Wagner, the private military company close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, burst into the open. For months, Wagner soldiers had been playing a lead part in Russia’s siege of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, at enormous human cost. Now, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s combative leader, had had enough. In a lurid video he released, he stood surrounded by the dead bodies of Wagner soldiers in Bakhmut, hurling expletives at Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, as well as at the head of the general staff and the head of Russian forces in Ukraine.…  Seguir leyendo »

Protesting in support of Ukraine, Bern, Switzerland, April 2022. Arnd Wiegmann / Reuters

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Russians are fleeing their country in droves. Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan; Estonia, Latvia, Montenegro. In the first two weeks of the war alone, Georgia took in 25,000 Russians, and Armenia was receiving some 6,000 Russians per day. By the end of March, 60,000 Russians had gone to Kazakhstan. And many more have sought refuge in a number of different countries in Eastern Europe. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began, Russians who have the means to do so have been racing for the border in what has become the largest exodus since the Bolshevik Revolution.

The dramatic flight underscores the far-reaching effects of Putin’s war.…  Seguir leyendo »

A man walks past an ad at an Internet devices shop in St. Petersburg in April 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

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In early December, Russian censors scored an unexpected success: Internet users all over the country reported that Tor, an encryption software that allows users to bypass online government controls, was going offline.

The Russian security services have been trying to neutralize Tor for years. They view it as the West’s censorship circumvention tool of choice. Its creation was sponsored by the International Broadcasting Bureau, a U.S. agency that provides technical support to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The irony, though, is that Russian state scored this victory over freedom of information with the help of Western companies.

Russia calls its system for controlling online discourse the “sovereign Internet.”…  Seguir leyendo »

Google and Apple removed a Russian opposition voting app from their online stores after pressure from Russian lawmakers. (Alastair Pike/AFP via Getty Images)

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On Sept. 16, one day before Russia’s parliamentary election got underway, members of the upper house of the Russian parliament summoned representatives of Google and Apple to rebuke them for allegedly “interfering” in the vote. The tech companies’ ostensible offense: allowing users to access a voting assistance app created by supporters of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. In the end, both companies buckled and removed the app from their online stores.

Much of the resulting coverage depicted Moscow’s crackdown on the two Silicon Valley platforms as just another part of the government’s broader assault on freedom of expression. But focusing on that aspect, as accurate as it is, risks missing a bigger story.…  Seguir leyendo »

Supporters of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny hold signs saying “Navalny” at a rally in Moscow last December protesting a court verdict against the anti-corruption blogger. Navalny received a suspended sentence for embezzling money, but his brother was jailed in a case seen as part of a campaign to stifle dissent. (Tatyana Makeyeva/Reuters)

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In late November, the number of websites being blocked in Russia reached 1 million, according to Roskomsvoboda, the country’s independent Internet censorship watchdog. This did not surprise the Russian online community, which is used to bad news. The Kremlin’s offensive against Internet freedom has intensified dramatically over the past three years, including the creation of website blacklists, the updating of an advanced national system of online surveillance and increased pressure on international Internet companies to share data with Russian security services.

The failure of the 2011-13 Moscow protests, Russia’s version of a “Twitter Revolution”, to ease Vladimir Putin’s grip on the country, along with all the depressing news from the Middle East, has led many to question the idea that online technology can be used to facilitate political change.…  Seguir leyendo »