Moscow Arrests Ten Senior Muslim Leaders, Sending New Chill through Russia’s Islamic Community

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 21 – The Russian authorities have arrested on a variety of charges ten senior Muslim leaders, an action that some are linking to a recent suggestion that Muslims are ready to take power in Russia and that others say is directed at undermining an even more senior mufti who in the Kremlin’s view has taken a too independent line.

            On the arrests, see  t.me/agentstvonews/15450, echofm.online/news/v-rossii-zaderzhany-kak-minimum-dva-muftiya, meduza.io/feature/2026/05/21/v-rossii-zaderzhali-dvuh-muftiev-duhovnogo-upravleniya-musulman-odnogo-zapodozrili-vo-vzyatke-vtorogo-v-nepovinovenii-politsii, https://t.me/OstashkoNews/213428 and sova-center.ru/religion/news/harassment/intervention/2026/05/d53798/.

            Neither the arrests themselves nor the specific reasons for them have been confirmed by Russian officials. On the one hand, that means that these actions may be the beginning of a general crackdown on the Muslim Spiritual Directorates (MSD) that oversee most of the Muslim parishes in the Russian Federation or a one time action.

            And on the other, because that is so, speculation is rife about what is going on. Most observers suggest it is Moscow’s response to suggestions by Ruslan Kutayev, the head of the Assembly of Peoples of the Caucasus and one of the five non-Russians on the Russian Platform at PACE, that Muslims are ready to take power in Moscow (ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/04/27/mibudem-kontrolirovat-moskvu-bivshii-vitse-premer-chechni-zayavil-chto-musulmane-gotovi-vzyat-vlast-vrossii-a193864).

              That is certainly plausible, although it is worth noting that Kurayev has made a variety of radical statements like this over the last decade and was not subject to arrest although he was forced to emigrate (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-north-caucasus-republic-will-emerge.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/05/north-caucasians-aspire-to-have-one-of.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/04/best-option-for-north-caucasian-peoples.html).

            Others have suggested that this is a Moscow move against Gainutdin (https://t.me/rybar/80400) and that the Kremlin may finally have decided to crush dissent within the Muslim community and make it as loyal to itself as is the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.

              If that is the case, the Russian authorities will have to do more than arrest a few dozen Muslim leaders given that Islam does not have clergy or a clerical hierarchy that Moscow can hope to control. Consequently, if these arrests do presage a new Moscow move against Islam, they are likely to presage widespread resistance. 

Russians Very Much Aware Unemployment is Rising, Whatever Kremlin Says, New VTsIOM Survey Shows

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 18 – The VTsIOM polling agency says that Russians are now more aware of rising unemployment in their country than they have been at any point since the beginning of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine. If this trend continues, the Agents portal says, “it will deprive the Russian authorities of one of their favorite arguments” that the economy is doing well.

            Polling agencies like the Kremlin-linked VTsIOM, the portal reports, have regularly compiled data on what they call “the unemployment index,” a metric that is based on surveys which ask Russians whether they know anyone among their circles who is out of a job (agents.media/rossiyane-stolknulis-s-dovoennym-urovnem-bezrabotitsy/).

            “In April,” it says, VTsIOM found that “the share of Russians reporting that four or more of their relatives or acquaintances in their social circles had lost their jobs rose to seven percent, up from five percent in March. Another 17 percent reported that one to three of their acquaintances had been left without work, compared to 16 percent the month before.”

            While nearly two-thirds continued to say that no one near them had lost a job, “the index, which reflets the difference between positive and negative responses to the question ‘How many people among your close relatives and acquaintance have lost their jobs over the last two to three  months’ rose by five percentage point in one month and reached an all-time high” since 2022.

            In posting these figures on its telegram channel, VTsIOM analysts suggested that “we may be witnessing the first signs of a reversal in the labor market which for the past four years has suffered from an excessively low supply of available labor.” If that is the case, then the Russian economy is doing worse and firms are shedding workers faster than officials admit.

Putin Regime Even Less Tolerant of Jokes than Late Soviet One Was, ‘Important Stories’ Suggests

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 21 – “When times are bad,” a Polish joke runs, “people tell political jokes. When they get worse, people stop.” That observation may help to explain why the Important Stories portal has found that the Putin regime is even less tolerant of jokes than was the Soviet in the Brezhnev era.    

After examining dozens of court cases in which standup comics and ordinary Russians have been charged and convicted for telling political jokes, jokes that the courts often repeat in their judgments, the portal reaches that thoroughly depressing conclusion (istories.media/stories/2026/05/21/o-chem-nelzya-shutit-v-rossii/).

According to its investigation, Russians of all kinds today put themselves in legal jeopardy if they tell jokes about Putin’s war in Ukraine, ethnic Russians and at least some other ethnic groups, religion in general and the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in particular, bribes, and of course Putin himself.

The Important Stories report concludes with a comment by Ekaterina Shulmann, a Russian political analyst now living in Kazakhstan, about this trend. She points out that in recent years, “the genre of stand-up comedy has acquired a certain social significant and its practitioners have come to resemble somewhat the variety show hosts of Soviet times.”

“Do you remember that significant segment of Russian culture? It was officially sanctioned, after all; these were not dissidents,” she asks rhetorically. “Yet, at the same time, there was something about them that wasn't entirely "Soviet." Some did suffer for what they said that sparked laughter but not as many as now.

In Putin’s time, “stand-up comedians began to be weeded out. Some suffered direct repercussions; others, having refused to support the war in 2022, left the country; while still others remained behind and attempted to engage in a delicate balancing act.” But the future for this kind of humor in Russia is not bright.

That is because “an authoritarian regime [like Putin’s] cannot tolerate individual agency in any sphere whatsoever. No matter what your line of work, if you act independently—rather than on official orders—and manage to do something that draws an audience and earns you public affection, that alone is deemed suspicious.”

Telling jokes in that environment is increasingly dangerous and thus increasingly both rare and private. 

Denunciation of Some Russians by Others has Tripled Over the Last Year – and Many are about Settling Scores Rather than Exposing Real Threats, Karpitskaya Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 18 – The number of denunciations of some Russians by others that were filed with the government’s communication agency tripled between 2024 and 2025, from 86,000 to 252,000, at least in part because of the Putin regime’s encouragement of the population to turn in those people are calling attention to violations of the law.

            Many of these complaints are legitimate and have led officials to investigate and bring charges, journalist Dina Karpitskaya says; but a large share of them reflect public paranoia, petty vindictiveness or a desire to “get on the nerves” of those co-workers, bosses or neighbors (kp.ru/daily/277783.5/5249794/).

            In a Komsomolskaya Pravda article entitled “Informants or Vigilantes? Russians File Hundreds of Reports against One Another,” Karpitskaya suggests that a large share of these denunciations cross the line from civic duty into slander based on no evidence or simple paranoia.

            The journalist calls particular attention to the emergence of companies offering services to those who want to file denunciations. She tested one of these companies and was offered its services to “’thoroughly vet’” the social media accounts of the person she was complaining about and for a fee to force those attacked to “run around police stations and other agencies.

            Unless Russians are encouraged to be more restrained, Karpitskaya says, the problem is likely to grow because “the system doesn’t always distinguish between genuine threat” and made up ones, a real problem given that “we certainly knowhow to put people behind bars for a single ear of grain.”

Declining Birthrates in Russian Villages Mean Rural Areas Can’t Compensate for Even Larger Declines in Russian Cities, Rosstat Figures Show

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 21 – Russian commentators and officials have comforted themselves for many years with the idea that birthrate in Russian villages are sufficiently high that they will cushion the country from the dramatically declining figures on that metric in Russian urban areas and even prompted some to call for “de-urbanizing” Russia to solve its demographic problems.

            But figures released by the Russian government’s statistical arm Rosstat show that in 2025 the fertility rate for Russia’s rural population had fallen to 1.464, slightly above the all-Russian figure including city residents but the lowest figure for rural Russia in 35 years  (vedomosti.ru/society/articles/2026/05/21/1198799-summarnii-koeffitsient-rozhdaemosti-v-selah-stal-minimalnim).

            The rural figure is far below the 2.2 children per woman per lifetime needed to keep the population of the country as a whole level and, even more than that, also mean that rural Russia now can do little to help compensate for the overall decline that is led by urban residents where the fertility rate is approaching 1.0 in some of the largest.

            The only time since the end of the USSR where rural population fertility rates were even as high as 2.2 was in 2014, when Rosstat reports that it reached 2.272. Since then it has fallen by almost one child per rural Russian woman per lifetime, a decline that tracks with what is going on in Russian cities.

            Two other developments Rosstat reports now are also likely to be worrisome to Moscow officials. First, the only federal subjects where the fertility rate is still above 2.2 are where there are non-Russian majorities such as Tuva where it stands at 2.56; and second, the decline in fertility rates in rural areas fell from 2024 to 2025 at twice the rate of urban areas, 0.06 compared to 0.03, in part because of Putin’s optimization program that has closed rural hospitals.

 

Ukraine Can Win Unless Moscow Uses Nuclear Weapons or Sparks a Revolution in Kyiv, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 21 – As Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine grinds on into its fifth year, ever more people are asking whether Ukraine can win. According to Vladimir Putin, it can do so as long as Russia doesn’t use nuclear weapons in a wholesale manner and as long as no revolution takes place within Ukraine itself.

            The London-based Russian analyst argues that “it is already clear what such a [Ukrainian] victory might look like” and even how it could be achieved (t.me/v_pastukhov/1910 reposted at echofm.online/opinions/kak-pobeda-ukrainy-mozhet-vyglyadet-s-uchetom-vseh-realij).

            “Provided that Ukraine does not overextend itself to the breaking point,” Pastukhov says, “it will with European support slowly and steadily drive up the cost of the war for Russia until that cost become politically untenable.” That would open the way for a Ukrainian victory and a Russian defeat.

            If the war does end with a Ukrainian victory, it is still “unlikely that Russia would lose Crimea … but it might well be forced to ‘regurgitate’ some of the territories it has occupied.” Instead, and “most likely,” he says, “the outcome would involve a ceasefire along the actual line of demarcation.”

            For Putin and the Russian elite, that would be “tantamount to defeat” because Putin loyalists “would not be able to accept the ruins of a half-conquered Donbass as adequate compensation for the rupture of normal relations with the West, four years of crippling sanctions, and the loss of several hundred thousand killed and maimed Russians.”

            Pastukhov says that he believes that “this reality is understood above all within the Kremlin itself and that Moscow’s future efforts in Ukraine will be “concentrated in two specific directions: the simulation of nuclear weapons use and attempts to eliminate Zelensky,” the latter being in the Kremlin’s mind “tantamount to a revolution in Ukraine.”

            Russia’s “actual use of weapons still appears to be a highly risky undertaking” and “the temptation to ‘do something’ about Zelensky and to try to install a different figure in his place for ‘negotiations’ will grow stronger with each passing day,” Pastukhov says, especially with the image of the US moves in Venezuela in the minds of the Kremlin.

            “If Zelensky should manage to survive such an ordeal in both a political and strictly physical sense,” the Russian analyst says, “then the time to ‘count one’s chickens’ will arrive in a different coop entirely, one where quite inconveniently for it, elections happen to be on the schedule in the near future.”

Russian Veterans ‘Simply Don’t Fit into Existing Political Machinery,’ Kremlin has Concluded

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 19 – Despite Putin’s constant suggestions that veterans of his war in Ukraine represent “the nation’s new elite,” there are ever more signs that in the view of the Kremlin, these people “simply do not fit into the existing political machinery,” according to Olga Churakova, a journalist with the Important Stories portal.

            As the 2026 Duma elections approach, she says, “the Russian authorities are as a result are wrestling with a dilemma: they need to bring war veterans into parliament” as Putin wants “without letting them coalesce into a genuine political force” that might challenge the Kremlin leader and his regime (istories.media/opinions/2026/05/19/ne-vremya-geroev/).

            In fact, Churakova continues, “the political system itself has no idea what to do with the veterans” when it comes to making them part of the elite.  Consequently, the Kremlin has scrapped plans to bring into the Duma as many as 150 veterans with insiders saying “you can’t bring people” in such numbers as “they are completely non-systemic.”

            First, the Kremlin reduced the number of veterans it planned to have in the Duma to 50 to 70 and more recently, it has cut them back further to about 40. According to Churakova, “the prospect of a new bloc of military deputies clearly makes the Kremlin uneasy;” and the Presidential Administration is trying to figure out how to ensure it controls them.

            One thing is clear, she continues, for the Kremlin, “the less consolidated this group remains, the easier it will be to manage them.” And there are other problems: “even at lower levels, the integration of veterans is already floundering” with many veteran-candidates having lost their primaries.

            Moreover, “despite the high level of societal respect for  war participants, there is no reliable public data indicating how this reverence translates into actual votes at the ballot box, Churakova says. As a result, “for political parties, running a veteran is a gamble that by no means guarantees victory.”

            “All this is unfolding against the backdrop of rapidly deteriorating social sentiment,” she says, and so “the authorities are being forced to maneuver carefully: they are already purging radical deputies from the public sphere to avoid inflaming domestic tensions.  As a result, “the prospect of introducing an unpredictable bloc of veterans suffering from PTSD into the new Duma looks quite risky.”

Churakova concludes: “The Russian authorities have backed themselves into a tight corner of their own making: these “war heroes” are desperately needed as ideological symbols, but they are far too dangerous to be empowered as real political actors.” This is leading the Kremlin to “lose face and quietly retreat from its declared principles.”