Moscow Giving Orders on Pandemic that Violate Russian Laws, Study Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 6 – Because the orders Moscow issues about coping with the pandemic are often completely at odds with existing laws, Russian citizens are increasingly unwilling to follow their directives and suspicious about what the Putin regime intends, commentator Yevgeny Chernyshov says (nakanune.ru/articles/117265/).

            Growing awareness of this gap is leading to speculation that the Kremlin isn’t really trying to fight the coronavirus but rather has declared war on covid in order to get the population mobilized so that the powers that be can use them toward some other, as yet unspecified end (gorod-812.ru/fejkovaya-zadacha-pobedit-virus-kovida/).

            Today, Russian officials reported registering 22,650 new cases of infection and 792 deaths from the coronavirus over the last 24 hours. Rosstat figures showed that Russia has suffered more than half a million excess deaths since the start of the pandemic, many of them directly or indirectly connected to the coronavirus (t.me/stopcoronavirusrussia/5501 and rbc.ru/economics/06/08/2021/610d63209a7947447438d76e).

            Deaths from the coronavirus in June jumped to a national high not seen in Russia since January; and one consequence of this is that the share of Russians who are now afraid of contracting the virus has gone up by five percentage points to 46 percent over the last month (regnum.ru/news/3339290.html and levada.ru/2021/08/06/koronavirus-3/).

            The pandemic continued to ebb and flow across the country, with a variety of new restrictions being imposed as news about hospitalizations and deaths has spread (regnum.ru/news/society/3337040.html, regnum.ru/news/3338684.html, regnum.ru/news/3338484.html and  chitazdrav.ru/node/8468 ).

            Anna Popova, Russia’s consumer protection chief, has sought to promote vaccination and the selective wearing of masks to fight the pandemic without suggesting that the pandemic in parts of Russia is growing so fast as to be beyond any short-term controls  (regnum.ru/news/3339052.html, regnum.ru/news/3339041.html, regnum.ru/news/3339036.html and regnum.ru/news/3339024.html).

            Meanwhile, Moscow’s Kommersant newspaper published the results of a study which showed how much various Russian pharmaceutical companies have made from producing the vaccine and other medical goods on which the regime has now spent 57 billion rubles (just under one billion US dollars) (kommersant.ru/doc/4929568).