Moscow Transforming Groups which Oppose It and UsingThem Under Their Original Names to Push Its Own Line

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 20 – What the Putin regime has done to the Yamal to Its Descendants NGO represents an increasingly serious challenge to the West: Working with Russian business, it has transformed a group that routinely spoke against Moscow’s pretensions into one that now can be counted on to spout the Kremlin line but without changing the name.

            Because many in the West know of this group because of its earlier activities, it thus retains an image which is no longer deserved but which many who interact with it at international forums do not fully recognize has been made into something entirely different, thereby creating a situation far more fraught than when Moscow closes down organizations. 

             This process is thus far more insidious and serious in its implications than when Moscow as often has been the case disbands existing groups and creates alternative ones, a tactic that has attracted far more attention but that has typically worked less well for Moscow than continuing to use existing groups after taking them over.  

            This process has occurred in many groups formed in Russia in the late 1980s and 1990s (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/08/moscow-not-only-repressing-non-russian.html); but nowhere has it been described in more detail than Arctida’s new article on changes in the Yamal to Its Descendants association (arctictoday.com/how-yamals-independent-indigenous-association-became-a-partner-of-the-authorities-and-the-oil-and-gas-companies/).

            The group, Arctida notes, was formed in 1989 to defend the indigenous peoples of the Yamal against the untrammeled actions of oil, gas and mining companies. It did so with vigor and sometimes success until about 2010  but now has stopped doing that and instead parrots the Kremlin line about Ukraine and other issues.

            In part, this change reflects the repression Moscow has visited on all hitherto independent groups; but in this case, it also involved the financial and personnel takeover of these groups by the businesses they had been opposed to and by Moscow loyalists in United Russia as well.

            As a result, Arctida says, the group still poses as a defender of the rights and interests of indigenous peoples but only “in situations where such a defense does not conflict with the interests of administrative elites and extractive companies.” This “defense” leads many to belief nothing has changed when in fact almost everything has.

            The new article traces how this process of regime capture was taken over the last two decades and how it has become even more severe since Putin launched his expanded war in Ukraine in 2022 and how this has helped the Kremlin confuse and misinform the West about what Moscow is doing in recent years.