Moscow’s Policies Disproportionately Hurting Women in Indigenous Communities, Four Human Rights Organizations Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 10 – Four human rights organizations have submitted a report on the impact of Russian policies on women in the indigenous peoples of the Russian north and far east for consideration by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women at its October meeting next month.

            The four – the International Committee of the Indigenous Peoples of Russia, the Memorial Anti-Discrimination Center, the Institute of Ecology and Anthropology and the North Women organization – say Moscow’s policies are disproportionately hurting women in these communities (indigenous-russia.com/archives/50079).

            The report says that since the last UN report on Russia’s indigenous peoples in 2021, their situation and especially that of women among hem has been “dramatically” worsened, with persecution of activists, weakening of indigenous institutions, the impact of the war in Ukraine, and the government’s decision not to publish necessary data.

            Nine of the 17 northern activists arrested last December were women. Many remain behind bars while others have been forced to flee abroad, the report says.  The mobilization of men for the war has imposed increasing burdens on women in these communities that the Russian government has done little or nothing to help.

            Business activity in the north has increased and with ever less attention to its impact on the population. Because women are now forced to bear an even heavier burden given the departure of men for the Russian army, they and their children are increasingly suffering.

            The report calls on the UN body to ask ten questions of the Russian authorities in the hopes that such queries will force Moscow to change course and address the specific problems women in its indigenous peoples increasingly face. But such hopes are likely misplaced: Russia did nothing after the UN body raised some of these points earlier.

Middle Corridor Carrying Four Times More Container Cargo toward the West than towards the East, Klevtsov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 10 – During the first eight months of this year, 80 percent of container cargo moved westward from China and Central Asia and only about 20 percent of the total moved in the other direction, an imbalance transport companies are trying to reduce because of costs, Igor Klevtsov says.

            The Kazakhstan transportation analyst points out that “For transport operators, the issue comes down to finances. Once containers reach Europe, they need to be used again or repositioned. If there is cargo for the return journey, the equipment generates revenue in both directions. Without it, operators can face the cost of moving empty equipment” (timesca.com/middle-corridor-freight-eastbound-cargo/).

            “The 80 percent to 20 percent split,” Klevtsov admits, does not show with any precision “how many containers are actually making the return journey [from Asia] without cargo; but the railway companies themselves are now acknowledging the shortage of eastbound cargo” and trying to attract more going from Europe to Asia.

            Beijing not surprisingly “continues to push for more westbound traffic,” showing little concern about boosting cargo flows in the other direction. But that is unsustainable over the longer term because the costs of returning empty containers eastward are growing.

            Shipping firms based in Central Asia and Europe are seeking to boost cargo flows in the opposite direction; but as of now, they are facing an uphill battle not only because China continues to promote western flows and because European companies are not exploiting the eastward direction to the extent many had hoped.

Declining Water Level of Caspian Forcing Ships to Change Their Routes and Preventing Larger Vessels from Using Many Ports, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 10 – A meeting of specialists on the Caspian Sea during Baku Climate Action Week said that the declining water level of the Caspian is already on course to have all the effects that the death of the Aral Sea had on the surrounding countries in Central Asia.

            But among its most immediate and serious consequences already have been two, the experts said. On the one hand, because water levels are declining, ships are having to change their routes on it to avoid running aground. And on the other, many ports aren’t able to process larger vessels (casp-geo.ru/iz-za-obmeleniya-kaspijskogo-morya-peresmatrivayutsya-podhody-k-navigatsionnoj-bezopasnosti/ ).

            For the time being, the first of these problems is being handled by distributing constantly updated maps of the depth of the sea in various places and directing captains to change their routes to avoid places where the sea, never that deep, has become too shallow for safety.

            But the second is more difficult. Dredging can only go so far in solving this problem because if too much of the sea floor is removed around piers, they will collapse. Consequently the only short term option is to significantly lengthen the piers into deeper water, something that is both increasingly expensive and increasingly difficult.

            That means that many ports will be temporarily or in some cases even permanently off limits to larger ships and that the littoral countries will have to consider creating entirely new ports, possibly on created islands far from the existing coast lines, an extremely costly but perhaps only reasonable option.

Anti-Semitism No Longer at Center of Russian Nationalism, Verkhovsky Says

Paul Goble

Staunton, Sept. 11 – Anti-Semitism, long a feature of Russian nationalism, has not disappeared; but it has become less central to that segment of Russian politics, largely displaced by hatred of foreigners, on the one hand, and moves against nationalist groups by the state which have made those remaining more cautious, on the other, Aleksandr Verkhovsky says.

At the end of Soviet times, the longtime SOVA expert on extremism says, “it was almost impossible to find a Russian nationalist who was not anti-Semitic.” Indeed, it was so central to most of them that it wasn’t given much attention as many assumed “there was no point in talking about the obvious” (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/09/11/antisemitizm-ot-rassveta-do-zakata).

In the first half of the 1990s, as the Levada Center documented, “mass anti-Semitism grew;” and nationalists took advantage of that. “But since the middle of that decade, openly anti-Semitic sentiment in the population became less widespread and intense,” and nationalists no longer saw it as something that helped them.

According to Verkhovskky, “this was probably the case because the population adapted to the changes” brought on by the end of the Soviet system; and “no anti-Semitic agitation, which was ten massive and completely unpunished could reverse this trend.” But after 1993, Russian nationalists no longer expected to win over a majority.

By the early 2000s, earlier Russian nationalist organizations had weakened and were displaced by Nazi skinheads, who remained overwhelmingly anti-Semitic but focused instead “not on the Jews but on peoples from the Caucasus and then on migrants from Central Asia.”

            Since 2007, as SOVA Center data show, “the proportion of Jews among victims of hate crimes has always been below five percent,” Verkhovsky continues. “There have been almost no murders of Jews,” but there have been more acts of vandalism against Jewish institutions, both still horrific and more than the share of the Jewish population.

            He says that “since 2014, the movement of Russian nationalists has been plunged into a deep crisis caused by differences towards the events in Ukraine and began to degrade quickly” as a distinc force. “But it did not disappear, and its anti-Semitism did not disappear within it.” However, anti-Semitism was less prominent among Russian nationalists.

            “A new catalyst for anti-Semitic sentiment was represented by the outbreak of the war in Gaza after October 2023,” Verkhovsky says, but not so much because of the conflict itself but rather because of “the change in Soviet government policy” toward the state of Israel.

“For the first time in the post-Soviet decades, Russian policy in the region has ceased to be neutral,” the SOVA analyst says. “The Kremlin unequivocally condemned the operations in Gaza and later supported Iran. This was accompanied by a sharp increase in anti-Israeli rhetoric, which was carefully controlled lest that provoke” popular anti-Semitism.

            Russian nationalists loyal to the Kremlin like the Russian Community generally avoided anti-Semitic messaging in their propaganda; but those who saw themselves as opposed to the Russian leadership were more inclined to cross the line from opposition to Israeli actions to a broader anti-Semitism.

            The latter,  however, were subject to repression by the Putin regime and no longer set the weather for Russian nationalism. That could change if anti-Semitism becomes more influential on a cultural level in the increasingly Russian Orthodox-dominated portion of Russian nationalism, Verkhovsky concludes.

Russian Only Language in Russia Not at Risk of Dying Out, Academy of Sciences Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 10 – Vladimir Putin and Russian propagandists constantly say that Moscow is doing everything necessary so that the minority languages of the Russian Federation can not only survive but flourish, a claim that the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences has just demolished.

            In a new report, the institute says that of the 155 languages of the Russian Federation, only Russian (and its version for the deaf which it counts as a distinct language) is not at risk of dying out (echofm.online/news/institut-yazykoznaniya-ran-ischeznovenie-ne-grozit-tolko-dvum-yazykam-rossii-russkomu-i-russkomu-zhestovomu).

            Two of these languages Aleutian and Itelmen are down to a single speaker, the institute reports, and another eight currently have fewer than 10 speakers. That means that 15 or nearly 10 percent of Russia’s minority languages are already “on the verge of extinction” and another 39 are classed as seriously vulnerable.

            What the government is doing as of now, the institute warns, is insufficient to prevent this catastrophe and says that “in an ideal situation, every language in the country requires all that is currently being done for the Russian language,” a requirement that the Putin regime shows neither the readiness or willingness to do.

            In addition to the importance of this exposure of a Kremlin lie that the situation with its languages is not deteriorating but getting better, this new Academy of Sciences report will undoubtedly further energize non-Russian national movements to seek a radical change in their situation possibly by exiting from Moscow’s control.

New Rosneft Oil Field in Far North Destroying Vast Areas of Vulnerable Tundra and Harming Indigenous Peoples who Live There

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 9 – A Rosneft project to develop oil fields in the far north of the Taymyr Peninsula is already inflicting “unprecedented” harm on thousands of square kilometers of tundra already at risk because of global warming and further threatening the lives of both animals and the indigenous peoples, according to satellite photographer and a Barents Observer analysis.

            As the project is only in its initial stages, the likelihood it will wreak havoc on an enormous swath of Russia’s north and its peoples is great, something especially tragic because outside experts say Moscow’s claims about is future production are greatly exaggerated (ru.thebarentsobserver.com/novosti/novyj-grandioznyj-neftanoj-proekt-putina-ostavlaet-arktiku-v-ruinah/457637).

            And that makes the celebration of what is as yet far from a realized achievement by Rosneft’s Igor Sechin and Russian President Vladimir Putin not only offensive but an indication that neither favors protecting the environment or the population living around places where oil is extracted and transported or is concerned with the truth.

            For a detailed discussion of these problems, see the report by Arctida, an environmental defense organization, available at arctida.io/en/projects/oil-pipeline-on-thin-ice and the discussion of that report at  windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/07/more-than-half-of-russias-250000-km-oil.html.

Twenty Years On, Kondopoga Clashes Still Cast a Shadow across Russia and Former Soviet Space

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept.8 – Twenty years ago, at the end of Augusta and the beginning of September 2006, ethnic clashes between local Russians and Chechen refugees broke out in the Karelian city of Kondopoga leaving at least two dead and creating in the minds of many Russians a picture of what could happen in any place in Russia at any time.

            That event, perhaps even more than the FSB-staged attacks on Russian apartment houses in 1999, created a groundswell of opposition to ethnic minorities and especially toward those viewed as migrant workers regardless of whether they came from abroad or not and an even more powerful growth in support for tough, even authoritarian measures against them.

            Indeed, in Russia and several of the other former Soviet republics, Kondopoga even two decades on remains less an historical event than a word that which is used about all kinds of ethnic conflicts not only by journalists and politicians but by ordinary people who fear they could easily become victims of similar outbursts.

            On that continuing influence of the Kondopoga events, see a commentary this week at veter.info/posts/dFu50tvutJbD.  For some examples of how Kondopoga has become a symbol, see windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2007/06/window-on-eurasia-spectre-of-kondopoga.html, windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/01/window-on-eurasia-kondopoga-like.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/02/window-on-eurasia-tatar-activists.html,  windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/02/window-on-eurasia-ethnic-clashes.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/08/kondopoga-like-violence-breaking-out-in.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/01/kondopoga-like-violence-breaks-out-in.html.