‘Thousands of Russians Complicit’ in Kremlin’s Electoral Fraud, Sokolov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 5 – As the Putin regime has tightened its control, not only have elections become ever more fraudulent but ever more Russians have become complicit in this fraud,  making it less likely that this fraud will be exposed and certain that it will cast a dark shadow on Russia even after Putin leaves the scene, Egor Sokolov says.

            In the first years of Putin’s rule, the regime did not have the control it does now. Journalists were freer to cover what was going on, and election observers were numerous and active, the Russian historian who just competed his studies at the University of Oxford. As a result, fraud was both easier to expose and less common (themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/05/the-kremlins-election-fraud-works-because-thousands-are-complicit-a93869).

            Now, however, Sokolov says, the press has been gelded; the observers have been blocked from doing their work; and genuine opposition parties like Yabloko have been prevented from running. And at the same time, the state has mobilized ever more people to work in election commissions which are tightly controlled.

            According to the Russian historian, this last move is especially disturbing in its consequences. Not only does it make electoral fraud “easier, it also corrupts tens if not hundreds of thousands of their members who either participate in the fraud or, at the very least, turn a blind eye to it.”

            The number of people involved is so large because “Russia has almost 50,000 election commissions, each of which consists of between three and 16 members.” Moreover, Sokolov continues, many of those now working on these commissions are teachers given that voting takes place most often in schools.

            That in turn means that the impact of fraud will spread to their pupils as well as having an impact on their future behavior, something that those concerned about creating an honest electoral system should be worried about given how difficult it will be to remove these twin nefarious influences from Russian life. 

Putin Regime Keeps Itself in Place Not Just by Carrots and Sticks but by Using Those to Define Social Relations among People, Rudkovsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 6 – Many assume that Putin keeps himself in power by a combination of carrots and sticks, Stanislav Rudkovsky says; but it is not by those alone. Rather, it is the way he uses such incentives and disincentives to regulate the way Russians interact with reality, a factor that by inertia keeps the situation under his control

            In Wschody, the émigré Russian libertarian politician and commentator argues that Putin remains in power “not only by fear and material dependence but also by daily life itself” that is so structured to preclude challenges (wschody.net/sem-stolpov-putinskoj-soczialnosti-kak-rezhim-stal-universalnym-posrednikom-mezhdu-rossiyanami-i-realnostyu/).

            According to Rudkovsky, “the key resource of this order is not only money, administrative vertical, security forces or control over information. Instead, it involves  manipulation of emotions, and control over identity, memory and language. He says that this involves seven “key pillars:”

            The first of these is “the vertical of mistrust,” the libertarian says. Russians “do not “trust anyone beyond a narrow circle of family and friends. All other are potential threats.” Of course, Putin didn’t invent this distrust but he has “instrumentalized it for his own purposes.”

            The second of these “pillars” is “loyalty in exchange for stability.” According to Rudkovsky, “Putin’s regime offers the population a very simple social contract: you do not get into politics,” show loyalty or at least don’t dissent, and “in exchange you are guaranteed ‘stability.’”

            The third such “pillar” is “an imperial identity and the colonial logic of mobilization: You are not a resident of a particular city or region; you are ‘part of a great country.’ Local identity is suppressed, and in its place stands an extremely generalized ‘pride in the country.”

            The fourth is “a culture of fear and cynicism. People don’t believe that it is possible to change anything at the global level and that collective action is suspicious” and inevitably fails. This attitude has its roots in Soviet times and is not despite what some thing an inherent quality of Russians.

            The fifth is the control of language. The regime “seeks not only to restrict access to information but also to determine what words people in Russia can use to describe the most transgressive states,” one that refers but does not name what is going on and thus euphemizes reality.

            The sixth pillar is the state’s monopolization of the past: “it assigns itself the right to interpret history alone, and primarily the highly traumatic experience of World War II.” As a result, the historical past of the country ceases to be a common space of discussion and becomes state property, issued to citizens in a dosed and consistent fashion.”

            And the seventh pillar of Putin’s organization of social interaction involves the cultivation of “a specific temporality: life is now because the future is unpredictable and does not belong to you: it belongs to a state that can rewrite it at any moment.”

            Taken together, Rudkovsky observes, there is “a common denominator: each pill has the effect of destroying some horizontal connection and replacing it with a vertical dependence on the state as the only source of meaning, stability and legitimate discourse.” Consequently, “Putin’s sociality involves the total monopolization of connectivity.”

            That in turn means, he concludes, that “Putin’s Russia is not just a bad form of rule. Rather it is a special and specific way of organizing social ties” so as to ensure that those in power cannot be effectively challenged and thus remain there.

Putin’s Much-Ballyhooed Power Vertical in Fact Consists of a Multitude of ‘Subverticals’ that Render the State Far Weaker than It Appears, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 6 – The Russian sate is “much weaker in reality than it appears to the outside” because it consists not of the single power vertical many like to talk about but rather of a plethora of “subverticals” which means officials must determine who is the critical figure in any particular situation, according to Abbas Gallyamov.

            Instead of applying laws and decisions equally regardless of who is involved, the former Putin speechwriter and now Putin critic says, officials act on the basis of their views about who is the most important and powerful figure in the case and thus undermine the power of the state, leaving it ever weaker (pointmedia.io/story/6ac3831875d0d3346a25cbc6).

            That may not be obvious to everyone all the time because the state’s coercive powers remain enormous, he continues; but it means that the state as an institutional whole is ever weaker since this coercion is used not so much to advance state interests as to promote those of leaders of one or another of “the subverticals” that form the regime.

            The former Putin speechwriter and now Putin critic says that a series of recent cases shows how this prevents officials from acting in the interests of the state and means that they will instead act in the their own interests or those to whom they are in fact rather than in law subordinate (pointmedia.io/story/6ac3831875d0d3346a25cbc6).

            That makes the state as a whole weak, something that is obscured much of the time because of the state’s enormous coercive power but that becomes critical when the state is subject to ever greater internal and external influences and thus acts not as a strong and integral state but as a congeries of groups, Gallyamov argues.

            A state is strong when “an official does not need to know who is behind the person applying to him: there is a single common procedure that must be used,” he continues. But in Russia, that is seldom the case; and the official’s “most important skill is to find out quickly who is behind whom” in each case.

            The more frequently that happens, Gallyamov says, “the stronger the state may appear to outsiders but the looser it is inside” and thus in fact the more at risk its survival in its current form becomes if it is buffeted as all states are by internal and external pressures.

Russia’s Birthrate will Continue to Fall Unless State Planners Return to Soviet Arrangement where Apartment Blocks were Surrounded by Common Yards, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – Many believe that Moscow can boost birthrates by increasing the size of apartments or building individual houses, but experts at a meeting in Yekaterinburg suggest that neither will do the job because they fail to provide state support for children growing up and thus shift that burden almost entirely to potential parents, Elena Rychkova says.

            In Soviet times, the Nakanune journalist says, the government kept the birthrate higher than it would otherwise be by creating yards around apartment blocks so that the community would bear the cost of supervising children rather than that burden being shifted to parents alone (nakanune.ru/articles/125115/).

            As land prices have increased, banks have favored construction of buildings closer together, a move that has destroyed parks and means that parents by themselves must bear all the costs of supervising children. Consequently, demographers say, larger apartments or separate ho        mes will do little to change that part of their calculation.

            For parks to return and thus for birthrates to rise, the experts continued, the state must take a larger role in urban planning and insist on parks around buildings rather than using up all the available land because of its rising costs. That way young people can have children confident that the community will bear much of the cost of supervising them.

            This judgment is critically important because it highlights the reality that larger apartments aren’t the real solution and that banks and builders will remain in opposition to almost any policies that might reverse the accelerating decline of the birthrate in the Russian Federation.

More than Half of Internet Cables in Russia Aging and Must Be Replaced, ‘Izvestiya’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – More than 50 percent of the internet cables linking computers together in the Russian Federation are older than their guaranteed life of 25 years and need to be replaced if the system is not going to be subject to repeated breakdowns, according to Russian government documents examined by Izvestiya.

            That finding (iz.ru/2176122/valerii-kodachigov/v-rf-mozhet-potrebovatsya-zamena-poloviny-linij-svyazi) not only because it suggests that the Russian internet system is at risk not just from Kremlin efforts to restrict access but for three larger reasons that call attention to problems a much larger problem.

            And that is this: Moscow has not been maintaining even those infrastructure investments it has made and thus is now seeing them begin to fail as well as those which the Soviet system had made earlier and on which the Putin regime and its immediate Russian predecessor has been living most of the time.

            That is because most internet cable in the Russian Federation as in other countries was laid not 40 or 50 years ago but less than 30. That means that the Kremlin, to ensure it has enough money to fight wars abroad, has not invested in infrastructure that it or its immediate Russian predecessors installed.

            Consequently, the Putin regime at least in this area but likely in many others as well is living off its own past as well as off the Soviet one, an approach for which the bill is certainly coming true, a bill that if the Kremlin doesn’t change course, is going to hurt ever more Russians and the prospect for the development of that country. 

If Russians Really Supported Repression, Kremlin Wouldn’t Be Restricting Release of Data about Such Policies, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 3 – It is an article of faith among many that Russians on the whole support the repressive policies of their government; but if that were so, Abbas Gallyamov says, the Kremlin would be less likely than it is to block the release of data about repression and might even be hyping it.

            To be sure, the decision to restrict such data also reflects a desire not to spark more criticism from its opponents abroad or to offend potential allies there, the Putin speechwriter turned Putin critic says; but that isn’t the whole story (t.me/abbasgallyamovpolitics/11225 reposted at echofm.online/opinions/esli-rossiyane-odobryayut-repressii-zachem-skryvat-ih-statistiku).

            Many people, especially liberals, believe that Russians “approve of repression,” Gallyamov says. “I have repeatedly said that this is not exactly the case and even rather not so at all. That the authorities have decided to hide relevant statistics” and block movies about siloviki misbehavior “confirms this once again.”

            According to the commentator, “the myth of approval for repression was born from the high ratings of early Putin and positive attitude towards Stalin. But in fact, a large part of the fans of both respect them not for repression, but rather the relationship of repression and other things.”

Russians in many cases believe that the achievements of the two leaders outweigh the costs of their use of repression, something that leads them to downplay or ignore repression but does not mean they actively support it. If a leader achieves a victory, Russians will forgive repression; if not, then not

That attitude does not represent unqualified support for repression but rather a contingent calculation, Gallyamov says. Consequently, a Russian regime not sure that it is achieving victory will try to hide its repressive moves lest information about them exacerbate popular anger about the failure to achieve some goal or another.

De-Colonization Broader and More Important than Other Terms Used to Discuss Russia’s Future, Orlova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – De-Colonization subsumes de-imperialization, sovereignization, federalization, and decentralization and allows for addressing all the questions they raise at one and the same time, Vasilina Orlova says. It is thus the most useful term to employ in discussing the future of the peoples now within the borders of the Russian Federation.

            “De-imperialization,” an anthropologist from Vladivostok now in the US says, “is about the abandonment of empire and imperial domination. Sovereignization concerns the acquisition of political subjectivity. Federalization focuses on a certain way of distributing power within a common state; and de-centralization is about the emergence of new centers of power” (wschody.net/federalizacziya-ili-dekolonizacziya-kto-reshaet-gde-periferiya/).

            According to her, de-colonization involves not only all of these issues but “also calls into question why a number of meanings have a culturally established and unquestioned primacy, one that can be explained only by established traditions, norms and values as dictated by colonial history.” As a result, de-colonization is the best framework to think about the Russian Federation.

            “De-imperialization,” Orlova continues, “is probably closest to the concept of de-colonization” given that as Russia arose as an empire, “it is natural to assume that the dismantling of the empire and its imperial implications should take place” to allow for all the peoples of the region, including Russians, to find a new place in the sun.

            She argues that it involves “the state’s rejection of imperial claims from the right to establish the boundaries of foreign subjectivity, from the idea of neighboring countries being within a sphere of its special interests, and from viewing some peoples as parts of a single historical whole which as a result of misunderstandings were split apart by state borders.

            De-imperialization is thus “a necessary part of de-colonization;” but it is far from all that is covered by the later term. That is because “the empire may disappear as a political struggle but the relations and perceptions it created will continue to exist.” That has certainly happened in Russia since 1991.

              Sovereignization is also close to de-colonization, Orlova writes; but it too is not the same thing. It is about who has the right to make decisions and thus may or may not involve the pursuit of independence by a group but also consider possibilities of federation or confederation.

              Those two concepts are also involved in such discussions especially as the Russian state is “already called ‘the Russian Federation.’” But most of those who advocate this do not challenge Moscow as the center of that state that will make the decisions for all other centers.

              Instead, she says, “federalization usually begins within the context of an already pre-existing map, one that says here is the Russian Federation and its subjects. Now, it is necessary to distribute power more fairly among them. The de-colonial view allows us to see that this map itself is the result of colonial history.”

              “Federalization can give the periphery more power,” Orlova continues; but “declonization calls into question the very right of the center to determine who is the periphery” and insists that “the center does not have some natural right to decide the fate of the territories because it has been able to govern them historically.”

Russia’s Parliamentary Parties Attract Different People Not So Much by Different Programs as by Different Emotional Appeals, INSOMAR Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 1 – INSOMAR, the Moscow Institute of Social Marketing on the basis of a survey says that Russians divide in their votes for the country’s parliamentary parties not because these parties offer radically different political programs than because they appeal to very different emotions.

            Using INSOMAR’s findings (t.me/insomar/499), the Club of the Regions identifies what it says are the differences among the parties in terms of the emotional appeals they have made to voters (club-rf.ru/theme/733). Here is how the Club’s experts describe the basic voters of four of these groups:

·       United Russia voters have enormous pride in their country and most of them expect positive changes in the country in the coming years.

·       KPRF voters in contrast are unhappy with the state of things in the country and a majority believe that worse times are ahead.

·       LDPR voters are proud of their country but say they are fed up with government news and are more likely than any of the others to articulate local and regional identities.

·       The New Peoples Party voters are the only party a majority of whom does not consider themselves supporters of any political powers. They are more economically active and want the state to stop interfering with the internet and let people work.

Neither INSOMAR nor the Party of the Regions talked much about Just Russia, a reflection of the fact that that party had a less clearly defined emotional content and thus was unable to set itself apart and attract voters on that basis than were the other four.  

Another Revenant from Soviet Past – Private Plots Provide Half the Potatoes Russian Eat

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – In Soviet times, much of the food Russians consumed was grown not in the fields of state and collective farms but on the small private plots that rural residents were allowed nominally for personal use but in fact to feed not only the rural population but to keep urban residents from starving.

            At that time, this was a source of shame in the Soviet Union; but it was regularly pointed to by commentators in the West as a sign that the collectivist approach to agriculture didn’t work and that capitalism would lead to expanded production and a better life for those who raised this food and those who consumed it.

            But today, despite the spread of capitalism throughout rural Russia, it is not the enormous farms controlled by large corporations but the small private plots that farmers and dacha owners maintain that is delivering a disproportionate share of food for residents of the Russian Federation.

            According to new research by the To Be Precise portal, a large share of the foods Russians consume comes not from the big farms but from private plots owned either by those with dachas or who work for the big agricultural firms (tochno.st/materials/bolse-poloviny-kartofelia-v-strane-vyrashhivaiut-na-licnyx-ucastkax-razbiraemsia-kak-ustroeny-ogorody-v-rossii).

            It reported that “more than half of the potatoes, about half of the vegetables and most of the berries in the country are now being produced not by agricultural holdings but by people on their personal plots” as private plots are now known. These figures are in fact less than they were in the 1990s when the private plots were responsible for up to 90 percent of such production.

            In some federal subjects – Dagestan, the Altai Republic, Karelia, and Kirov Oblast – more than 90 percent of all vegetables are produced on such plots, while in others the figures are much smaller. There and elsewhere, some of the private plot production comes from small farms; but most of it comes instead from dacha lands or gardens of agricultural workers.

            This pattern reflects the fact that large but now private farms produce mostly for export and the kind of output that Russians actually consumes requires the personal involvement and commitment of farmers rather than just a change in the formal ownership of the property that so many have claimed will give rise to more food production by itself. 

Having Closed Thousands of Rural Libraries before 2022, Putin is Now Purging the Shelves of Those Still Operating, ‘Veter’ Journalist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – Having closed an average of 1,000 rural libraries a year even before he invaded Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin is now overseeing the purging of the books those still hanging on have on their shelves, an action that is a tragic echo of what Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya did in the first years of Soviet power.

            That action, described by the late Bertram Wolfe in his classic 1969 Survey article “Krupskaya Purges the People’s Libraries” describes how the Bolsheviks put a straightjacket on intellectual life in the USSR. What Putin is doing now is at least as instructive and reprehensible but not yet nearly as widely condemned.

            An important exception to this restrained reaction is provided by Veter journalist Yulia Kulikova in an article which quotes one rural librarian as saying Putin is removing from the shelves “all of our classics” (veter.info/posts/eRnmWyJBAJb6 reposted at novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/10/02/my-takimi-tempami-izbavimsia-ot-vsekh-nashikh-klassikov).

            Unlike Krupskaya’s attack, Putin’s is easily hidden from prying eyes because money is still going to libraries, albeit from businesses working in the area rather than the state but for furniture and computers but not books and because the censorship is not imposed all at once but rather gradually as more and more authors are deemed foreign agents or worse.

            Rural libraries in the Komi Republic which Kulikova examined remove books the state doesn’t approve of, don’t buy books that it fears will get them in trouble such as anything about LGBT+ people, but also doesn’t buy even what the regime wants disseminated such as books about Putin’s war in Ukraine.

            As a result, the intellectual life of rural Russia is being strangled. And it is not just books: most rural libraries aren’t connected to the internet and so the computers businesses help pay for can’t be used to access the broader world that the web promises, limiting their educational role to preparing local people to work for businesses rather than broadening their horizons.

            These actions are typically justified by the Putin regime as “optimization,” the reduction in funding to libraries and schools which service relatively few people; and that justification is accepted by all too many people in Russia and the West. But the reality is worse: optimization in this case is simply a euphemism for destruction.

Academician Says Almost All Peoples in Russian Federation are ‘Indigenous,’ Raising Questions about Special Legal Status of ‘Indigenous Numerically Small Peoples’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – Academician Andrey Golovnyov has called for identifying all the peoples of the country “indigenous” if they have historical and ethno-genetic roots on its territory regardless of their memory, an idea that will please Russian nationalists who resent the fact that in law, ethnic Russians are not “indigenous.”

            The director of the Kunstkammer Museum made that proposal at a session of Federation Council’s Committee on Federal Structures, Regional Policy, Local Self-Administration and the Affairs of the North on September 28 (indigenous-russia.com/archives/50603) and thereby opened a can of worms with potentially far-reaching consequences.

            Golovnyov was careful to say that he did not want to see any change in special rights the 47 numerically small peoples of the north, Siberia and the Far East now enjoy under Russia’s legal system. But by suggesting that almost all peoples in the country are indigenous, he is whether he intends to or not challenging that arrangement.

            Under current Russian law, the numerically small indigenous peoples are those 47 peoples who live on the territories of their ancestors, preserve a traditional way of life and economic activity, number fewer than 50,000 peoples and recognize themselves as distinct ethnic communities.

            Russian law does not define indigenous any other way; but of course, indigenous in the everyday meaning of a people long settled on a particular territory and in the Russian legal code defined as the numerically small peoples of the north, Siberia and the far east are not one and the same thing.

            But insisting, as Golovnyov has done, that all peoples who are indigenous in the common sense meaning of the term raises questions about whether the status of the numerically small indigenous peoples as a special legal category won’t be affected even if he would leave their status untouched.

            The issue of the definition of who is indigenous and who is now has been percolating for some time and not only among Russian nationalists. First, there is the question of number. One numerically small people – the Nenets – is close to the 50,000 figure. If it passes that, will it lose its status? Or will others gain that status if they fall below that number in the future?

            Second, the numbers question has both a domestic and an international component. Within Russia, there is a very real issue of what government level should have the right to determine who is and who is not a numerically small people. And abroad, Russia’s indigenous peoples deal with their counterparts in other countries who do not think in the same categories.

            In almost all of them, governments and activists stress the traditional way of life rather than the number of people pursuing it. That means many of those who define themselves as indigenous abroad are far larger than the Russian communities with whom they interact and thus have larger agendas than most of the Russian ones do.

            And third, will calling almost everyone including ethnic Russian indigenous undermine the existing government programs for the numerically small indigenous peoples and put even more of them on track to disappear in the future, something Golovnyov is against but that Putin’s support for exploitation of their territories makes increasingly likely?

            That is far more likely than many are willing to recognize. Already, of the 47 nations identified as indigenous, only three have majorities who know their national language, a clear sign of just how much pressure they are under (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/08/in-only-three-of-47-numerically-small.html).

            It should be obvious that indigenous and numerically small indigenous nationalities are not equivalent terms, but in the Russia of Vladimir Putin, that is likely to be forgotten and those who are called indigenous now are almost certain to suffer the most just so some Russians offended that the state doesn’t call them indigenous now can gain such official recognition.

 

Except at Official Functions, Russian Soldiers Fighting in Ukraine Never Refer to Themselves as ‘Liberators,’ Russian Philologist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 – Putin and his propagandists routinely refer to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine as “liberators,” but Aleksey Tikhonov, a Russian philologist, says that he has found no cases where the soldiers call themselves that except at official propaganda functions where they have to hew the line.

            That is just one examples of the way in which official terms have not caught on, the scholar who now teaches at the University of Zurich says. But the failure of propaganda to be accepted is also highlighted by the way in which those who do use these terms given them radically different meanings (svoboda.org/a/nazvatj-voynu-voynoy-kak-i-pochemu-menyaetsya-yazyk-rossii-i-ukrainy/33865662.html).

            Some Russians and many Ukrainians are now using the word “liberator” in a highly ironic sense, with some even suggesting that before the Russian soldiers can liberate anyone else, they must liberate themselves and their own country, something that hasn’t happened and doesn’t appear likely to.

            In the course of a lengthy interview, Tikhonov describes the way soldiers on both sides of the line have adapted language to make their suffering easier to take; but perhaps most important, he discusses not just how war affects language but how language has an impact on war – and thus why rulers care so much about the language used.

            For governments, especially those which are engaged in aggression and violation of human rights, the philologist says, using bureaucratic language helps them to project the idea that war is in fact “part of ordinary life and nothing particularly different from it. But this acquires new meaning when the leaders start talking about war and fighting a war.

            During the first several years of his war, Putin insisted on calling it a special military operation and punished those who called it a war; but now the Kremlin leader and his propagandists call it a war because they can no longer hide from those taking part and others affected that it is precisely that.

            But when leaders start talking about war, Tikhonov says, they are showing that they are committed to fighting to the death, a position that is superficially attractive as far as they are concerned but one that opens the door to doubts among the population and often in the past the defeat of those who decide to talk about war all the time.

From Times Immemorial, Russian Leaders and Their Populations have Been Bored When They aren’t Fighting a War, New Moscow Comic Book Suggests

Paul Goble

              Staunton, Oct. 1 – While many would suggest that Putin’s presentation of Russian history has many comic-book-like elements, a real comic books has now appeared in Moscow suggesting that Russian leaders and the Russian people have been bored when they aren’t fighting a war.

              The Bombor publishing house has now issued a comic book, The History of Russian in Comics. From the Ancient Slavs to Vladimir Putin, which in frame after frame carries that message (nemoskva.net/2026/10/01/vyshla-istoriya-rossii-v-komiksah-ot-drevnih-slavyan-do-putina/).

              Many times Russian leaders as presented in this comic say they are “bored” when they are sitting at home rather than going to war, although to be fair, a few, including Nicholas II, are less than pleased with what happens after they take up arms against someone. Only when Russian leaders fight and win wars do the Russian people enthusiastically support them.

              The comic book which echoes Putin’s own line isn’t winning from Russian readers. All those who left reviews at the Labyrinth book store were negative, with one typical description of the comic being that it is “a terrible propaganda product” and not worth "more than a kopek."

Pro-War Russian Writers Say Moscow Isn’t Doing Enough to Fight the War in Ukraine or Support Their Own Efforts to Generate Support for It

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 1 – A group of Russian writers who have criticized the Kremlin for not doing enough to win in Ukraine is now complaining that the Kremlin isn’t supporting them in ways that allow them to get their message to Russians in general and school children in particular, the Ostorozhno Novosti agency says.

            At a roundtable of such writers in St. Petersburg, Aleksandr Pelevin said that Moscow has failed to launch “a special cultural operation since the war began” as a result of which “patriotic poetry was “in decline as it is hard to keep writing about the capture of yet another small village” (t.me/ostorozhno_novosti/55435 and ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/01/zagnali-v-zagon-z-pisateli-pozhalovalis-chto-ih-ne-podderzhivaet-gosudarstvo-i-ne-chitayut-rossiyane-a207490).

            Another pro-war poet, Aksel Kobokki said Moscow’s failure to launch a cultural effort alongside its military one was threatening patriotic feelings among many Russians who have “little trust in the people aligned with the authorities as a result” and that patriots were finding it harder to defend their allies than ever before.

            And a third speaker at the meeting said that he was aware of “orders to keep patriotic writers out of schools” and that these orders “came from the highest levels of the government.” Still others complained that writers at the front weren’t being given leave to attend literary events.

60 Percent of Infrastructure on Russia’s Arctic Coast Threatened by Melting Permafrost and Warming Sea, EU’s Copernicus Monitoring Service Says

Paul Goble

              Staunton, Sept. 30 – Sixty percent of the infrastructure in coastal regions of the Russian Federation along the Arctic is at risk of collapse as a result of the ever-more-rapidly melting permafrost underlying it and the rapid warming of the Arctic Ocean which leads to more waves and erosion there, the EU’s Copernicus Monitoring Service says.

              In a new report based on an examination of the Arctic and adjoining areas, the European Union science office says that over the past four decades, the ice cover over off the Russian coast is receding faster than elsewhere in that sea (rfi.fr/ru/в-мире/20260930-доклад-copernicus-полярные-льды-быстрее-всего-тают-у-берегов-россии).

              That allows for more shipping; but together with the melting of permafrost in northern Russia, it is undermining infrastructure built near the coast because the warming of the sea means that waves are larger and contribute to more erosion of the ground on which they are built.

              According to Copernicus, the area of Arctic sea ice in the summer has been declining at the rate of more than 10 percent per decade and the Arctic waters have been warming “almost six times faster than the planet on average since 1980,” with last summer being the warmest on record.

              The Arctic Ocean off Russia’s coast is leading in this regard. According to the authoritative European center, the surface temperature of the Kara Sea has been going up by 1.68 degrees centigrade every decade, “about 14 times faster than the average for the world’s oceans as a whole,” with the Laptyev and Bering seas not far behind.

Kremlin Comes Up with Another Way to Hide Its Shortcomings: It will Cut Off Funds to Those Making Films Showing Corrupt Siloviki

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 – Russian filmmakers will lose state financing if they produce films showing Russian police or security forces accepting bribes or engaged other corrupt enterprises, Kommersant reports, pointing to yet another way the Kremlin is expanding censorship and seeking to hide problems with the Russian regime.

            Two sources in major film studios said messages to that effect have already been sent to the leaders of their studios as others and that the rule was being introduced in this way and that no one expects it to be enshrined in any formal documentation that would attract unwanted attention (kommersant.ru/doc/8990074).

            The imposition of the rule in this way is possible because “all producers know about this” already, one of the Moscow newspaper’s sources says; and they recognize that they could lose more than money because any negative treatment of the police, the FSB, the Investigations Committee or the Procuracy could be presented as undermining those institutions.

            Introducing new rules in this way often happened in Soviet times, but it is making a comeback in Putin’s, giving the regime an opportunity to deny what it is in fact doing while continuing to do it and thus making it harder but as Kommersant shows not impossible to keep track of increasing repression introduced in this way.

           

A Russian Invasion of Baltic Countries ‘Now a Likely Scenario,’ Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 –A year ago, Vladimir Pastukhov said that there were there possible scenarios for Moscow’s moves regarding the Baltic countries and eastern Europe more generally – mobilization, hybrid (subversive) war or invasion – and that the last of these was the most unlikely of all.

            But now, the London-based Russian analyst says, the situation has changed because of how the Kremlin leader views the situation; and he argues that an invasion seems to him to have become “a likely scenario” for what Putin will do next (echofm.online/opinions/vtorzhenie-kazhetsya-mne-dostatochno-veroyatnym-sczenariem).

            Pastukhov says that it many ways the current situation in Moscow parallels the situation in Washington at the time when Ronald Reagan came to power. He formed two groups, Team A, which consisted of government experts, and Team B which was made up of university experts and was headed by Richard Pipes.

            The first team, the Russian analyst says, argued that “the USSR would eventually be more and more like a ‘normal’ European state and its aggressive energy would fade. Because of the likelihood of that, the West’s strategy should be not to take any steps that would interfere with this evolving convergence.

            Team B, led by Pipes, came to “the exact opposite conclusion.” Focusing on communist ideology, they argued that “aggression is an essential feature” of those who accept this ideology and that Washington and the West must therefore adopt a strategy of “’strategic deterrence’” to prevent disaster.

            Reagan was convinced by the arguments of Team B and launched a program designed to contain and weaken the USSR. “Ultimately,” Pastukhov says, “this accelerated the collapse of the USSR although in my opinion, that was not the cause” of what Putin calls “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20^th century.”

            The London-based analyst suggests that a debate has been taking place behind the scenes in Moscow much like the one between Team A and Team B almost half a century ago and says that Putin has accepted as the basis of his actions the view that aggression is not only necessary but useful whatever Russian government experts say.

            Because that is so, the Kremlin leader is likely to launch more aggressive actions against the West in general and the Baltic countries in particular as long as he believes that he is winning in Ukraine. Unless he loses there and loses convincingly, that won’t change as long as Putin is in office in the Kremlin.