Charges of ‘Discrediting Russian Army’ Far More Common Per Capita Outside the Capitals than in Them, Grayevsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 18 – Artur Khachuyan, a specialist in Big Data, counted the number of cases Russian officials have brought against people for actions the authorities deem “discredit the army” (paperpaper.io/papernews/2023/2/17/v-rossii-vypisali-5-tysyach-shtrafov-po-sta/). Not surprisingly, the largest number of cases have been in the two Russian capitals.

            That is what everyone expects, of course, but such numbers are not nearly as suggestive of what the situation across the Russian Federation is like than the number of cases per million residents, Stanislav Grayevsky says. Those figures show that many regions are vastly more given to protest and then repression than Moscow and St. Peterburg (region.expert/heat-map/).

            If one arrays this data on a map, the Russian futurist says, one sees that the real dissenting regions as measured in this way are in the northwestern quadrant of European Russia, the territory of the Novgorod Republic in the past, the Russian Far East and areas along the Russo-Chinese border.