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      In Russian Schools, It’s Recite Your ABC’s and ‘Love Your Army’

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      The curriculum for young Russians is increasingly emphasizing patriotism and the heroism of Moscow’s army, while demonizing the West as “gangsters.” One school features a “sniper”-themed math class.A new version of the ABC’s in Russia’s Far East starts with “A is for Army, B is for Brotherhood” — and injects a snappy phrase with every letter, like, “Love your Army.”A swim meet in the southern city of Magnitogorsk featured adolescents diving into the pool wearing camouflage uniforms, while other competitors slung model Kalashnikov rifles across their backs.“Snipers” was the theme adopted for math classes at an elementary school in central Russia, with paper stars enumerating would-be bullet holes on a target drawn on the chalkboard.As the war in Ukraine rolls into its 16th month, educational programs across Russia are awash in lessons and extracurricular activities built around military themes and patriotism.These efforts are part of an expansive Kremlin campaign to militarize Russian society, to train future generations to revere the army and to further entrench President Vladimir V. Putin’s narrative that “a real war has once again been unleashed on our motherland,” as he declared in a sober address at a ceremony last month.The drumbeat of indoctrination essentially started with Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, but the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has accelerated it. The Ministry of Education and Science releases a constant stream of material, including step-by-step lesson plans and real-life examples — like a video of a student concert that used poetry, dance and theater to explain the history of Russian foreign intelligence.“It includes all levels, from kindergarten to university,” said Daniil Ken, the head of the Alliance of Teachers, an independent Russian union, who works from voluntary exile. “They are trying to involve all these children, all students, directly in supporting the war.”Members of the Russian Young Pioneers attending an induction ceremony, organized by the Russian Communist Party, at Red Square in Moscow in May.Maxim Shipenkov/EPA, via ShutterstockFor years, Russia’s leaders sought to condition its citizens to accept Moscow’s leadership, partly by barring politics from schools. Now the Kremlin hopes to persuade the public to actively back the war effort, and when it comes to younger males, to fight.Yet it also wants to avoid fanning too high a patriotic flame, lest it push Russians to start questioning the purpose of the war. Much the way Mr. Putin has refrained from enacting multiple conscriptions of soldiers to avert prompting antiwar sentiment, the Kremlin has left parents some leeway to avoid propaganda lessons. In that, they may be hoping to avoid the disconnect that emerged in the Soviet era, when the education system portrayed the country as the land of Communist plenty, even as ordinary Russians could see that the shelves were bare.“They want enthusiasm, but they realize if they push too hard it could galvanize an organized opposition,” said Alexandra Arkhipova, a social anthropologist who studies public reactions to the war. “They do not want people to protest.”Interviews over the past month with sociologists, educators, parents and students, and a review of extensive material online posted by the schools themselves and by local news outlets, show a comprehensive government effort to bolster military-patriotic content through all 40,000 public schools in Russia.The cornerstone of the initiative is a program called “Important Conversations,” started last September. Every Monday at 8 a.m., schools are supposed to hold an assembly to raise the Russian flag while the national anthem is played, and then convene an hourlong classroom session on topics like important milestones in Russian history.The minister of education, Sergei Kravtsov, did not respond to written questions. When the program was introduced last fall, he told the official Tass news outlet, “We want the current generation of schoolchildren to grow up in completely different traditions, proud of their homeland.” Both an official Telegram channel and a website disseminate materials for the classroom.“Important Conversations” has been supplemented by programs with names like “Lessons in Courage” or “Heroes Among Us.” Students have been encouraged to write poetry extolling the Motherland and the feats of Russian soldiers. Myriad videos show elementary school children reciting lines like, “All the crooks are fleeing Russia; they have a place to live in the West; gangsters, sodomites.”In this photograph provided by state media, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, is shown meeting with the country’s education minister, Sergei Kravtsov, in Moscow, in 2021.Sputnik/via ReutersLessons draw heavily on earlier conflicts, particularly the Soviet Union’s success defeating Nazi Germany. Suggestions based on that earlier time sometimes seem antiquated, like encouraging students to knit socks for the troops.“It is very theatrical,” said Ms. Arkhipova, the social anthropologist. “It serves as a kind of proof that the entire war is the right thing to do because it mirrors World War II.”Countless schools have been renamed to honor dead soldiers, and memorials are rife. They include a “Hero’s Desk” in classrooms that often displays the picture of an alumnus who is supposed to be honored.Veterans are trotted into classrooms frequently to detail their experiences. In late April in Dmitrov, a small city near Moscow, three soldiers addressed a roomful of students aged 10 to 15, some waving small Russian flags. A video of the session shows one fighter talking about wanting to protect his homeland against “fascist filth.”Overall, however, there is no monolithic propaganda machine because the decision on how to implement “Important Conversations” has largely been left to local school administrators.Some teachers take a hard ideological approach. A video posted by the Doxa news outlet showed a teacher demanding that students pump their fists in the air while singing a popular song called, “I Am Russian.” The teacher barks: “The thrust should be to the sky, to NATO.”Other teachers do not even mention the war, particularly in places like Moscow, where many parents disapprove of attempts to indoctrinate their children.Yuri Lapshin, formerly the student psychologist at an elite Moscow high school, said in an interview that while researching a paper, he found examples of unique interpretations of the program. One math teacher, for example, told students that the most important conversation in the world was about algebra, so he dedicated the class to that. On a day supposedly focused on the concept of “fatherland,” a biology teacher lectured about salmon spawning in the rivers where they hatched.Even when the war lessons occur, they sometimes fall flat. At an assembly with two fighters, students from a St. Petersburg technical college basically mocked them. They questioned why fighting in another country meant they were defending Russia, and how God might view murdering others, according to a recording of the assembly. Administrators rebuked at least five students for their questions, local reports said.Children holding portraits of Russian soldiers who were killed in the war in Ukraine as they take part in the opening ceremony of a memorial in their honor in Crimea in May.Alexey Pavlishak/ReutersSasha Boychenko, 17, a high school senior, attended four “Important Conversations” sessions in Vladivostok last fall before her family left Russia. Bored students laughed at the historic displays, she recalled. “After the class, we wondered why we had come,” she said in an interview.Alexander Kondrashev, a history teacher in Russia for 10 years, said he was awaiting a revised version of the textbooks this fall. An early copy obtained by the Mediazona news organization found one fundamental change; all references to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, as the springboard for Russia as a Christian nation have been expunged.“Nobody perceives ‘Important Conversations’ as learning something that will come in handy in life, like physics, math, geography or the knowledge from history lessons,” Mr. Kondrashev said in an interview.Noncompliance takes various forms. The Alliance of Teachers advised parents that they can formally opt out of the classes, while some have their children show up late or call in sick on Mondays. Defiance makes certain parents nervous, experts said, especially given about a dozen cases where school officials reported on unenthusiastic parents or students.A woman named Zarema, 47, said she worried about her three sons in school in Dagestan. While she sends her youngest son, a sixth grader, to the “Important Conversations” class, she told him never to engage politically. “We are all scared of everything here now,” she said, asking that her full name not be used while criticizing the war.Russia has largely presented the war as an economic opportunity in poorer areas, while being far less aggressive in major cities.Cadet students in February at the Victory Museum, which is dedicated to Russia’s World War II victory over Nazi Germany.Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times“They are trying to target the people who have fewer resources,” Greg Yudin, a Russian sociologist doing research at Princeton University, said in an interview “They give you an option that promises money, status, benefits and in addition to that you will be a hero.” Even if they persuade only 20 percent of the youth to join the army, that is still a lot of brigades, he noted.Toward that end, the Ministries of Education and Defense have announced that military training will be mandatory next year for 10th-grade students. Girls will learn battlefield first aid, while the boys will be instructed in drill formation and handling a Kalashnikov, among other skills.At universities, the curriculum in the fall will include a mandatory course called “The Fundamentals of Russian Statehood.”The course is still in development, Mr. Yudin noted, but he said that what details have emerged tended to echo Mr. Putin’s worldview of Russian exceptionalism and the idea that the battle waged against Western dominance for the past 1,000 years would continue for another 1,000.“The single best possible way for them to get this society mobilized is to brainwash the young,” Mr. Yudin said. More

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      Ukraine Strips a Pro-Putin Politician of His Citizenship

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      Ukraine has stripped Viktor Medvedchuk — a former oligarch and a close friend of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — of his Ukrainian citizenship, the government says, in an announcement that highlights Kyiv’s effort to excise the influence of prominent pro-Moscow politicians within the country.Mr. Medvedchuk, a former deputy speaker in Ukraine’s Parliament and a onetime presidential adviser, was handed over to Russia in September as part of a prisoner swap. The authorities in Ukraine had captured him in April after he fled house arrest while awaiting trial on treason charges in a case initiated last year.His influence in Ukraine was such that his name surfaced in the U.S. investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 American elections. Mr. Medvedchuk was a client of Paul J. Manafort, the Republican political consultant who advised pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians before becoming chairman of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign.President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an overnight speech late Tuesday that the decision to end Mr. Medvedchuk’s citizenship was based on a report by the country’s security services. “If people’s deputies choose to serve not the people of Ukraine, but the murderers who came to Ukraine, our actions will be appropriate,” Mr. Zelensky said.Russia’s invasion has made national survival the overriding focus of Ukraine’s politics, and, as a result, has closed the space for agents of Moscow’s influence who for decades have played a role in Ukraine’s internal affairs.Last spring, Ukraine seized some of Mr. Medvedchuk’s vast wealth, which had been amassed through energy deals with the Kremlin while he worked in support of Russian interests in Ukraine and beyond.Mr. Zelensky said that the state had also stripped citizenship from three others: Leonidovych Derkach, Taras Romanovych Kozak and Renat Raveliyovych Kuzmin. All three were at onetime members of Ukraine’s Parliament and served pro-Russian interests.Mr. Medvedchuk was handed over to Russia in September alongside Russian pilots and senior military officials in exchange for more than 200 Ukrainian fighters. Given that he has already been living in Russia for months, the immediate effect of the citizenship decision on him may be limited.Mr. Putin visited Mr. Medvedchuk’s Crimea residence in 2012, and an official Kremlin photograph showed him with the Russian leader at a martial arts tournament in 2013.Russian officials had previously played down their interest in Mr. Medvedchuk, despite his ties to Mr. Putin, who is the godfather of Mr. Medvedchuk’s daughter. A Kremlin spokesman in May had dismissed the idea of exchanging Mr. Medvedchuk for Ukrainian fighters, saying that he had “nothing to do with Russia,” according to the Russian state news media. More

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      Why Queen Elizabeth’s Strength Is Putin’s Weakness

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      Why is Vladimir Putin failing to win his war in Ukraine? The answers multiply: hubris, corruption and incompetence on the Russian side; military valor, canny leadership and American munitions on the Ukrainian side.But the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the wave of antique pageantry help illuminate one of the Russian president’s important weaknesses. He has been hobbled in his fight because his regime lacks the mystical quality we call legitimacy.Legitimacy is not the same thing as power. It’s what enables power to be exercised effectively amid trials and transitions, setbacks and successions. It’s what grounds political authority even when that authority isn’t delivering prosperity and peace. It’s what rulers reach for when they call their societies to sacrifice.In most of the world today there are only two solid foundations for legitimacy: the demos and the nation, democracy and national self-determination. The legitimacy that once attached to imperial rule has washed away, and likewise, outside of the Middle East and a few other places here and there, the legitimacy of hereditary monarchy. Alternative claims to legitimacy exist — the ideological authority invoked by the Beijing Politburo, the religious authority invoked by the mullahs in Tehran — but those claimants rely more on repression for power and survival.The Elizabethan pageantry emphasizes this global reality because the House of Windsor is an exception that proves the rule. Like almost no other institution in the West outside the Vatican, the British monarchy has retained a pre-modern, pre-democratic legitimacy; in the outpouring of secular grief there was still a sense that the queen was somehow God-ordained to sit on the throne. But the royal family has kept that legitimacy by giving up all but a fraction of its personal power; it has legitimacy and little else.In Moscow you have the contrast: personal political power, far greater than the power of King Charles III, that lacks deep legitimating structures. Putin is a pseudo-czar but not a real one, with no divine anointing or ancient oath. He claims some Russian-nationalist legitimacy, but his system is actually a polyglot imperium. He claims some democratic legitimacy by holding regular elections, but their results are neither fair nor free.So all he has to really justify his power is success. Which he has delivered for most of his career — a Russia richer and more stable than in the years before he took the presidency, and a series of successful foreign policy gambits.But now comes the test, the gambit that hasn’t delivered, the specter of defeat, and what does he have to fall back upon? Not the authority of a czar: He cannot mobilize the Russian people as feudal subjects, calling on them to treat imperial Russia’s grand projects as their own. Not the authority of a national leader in a struggle for self-determination: He is the invader; it’s Ukraine that’s fighting for a nation. And not the authority of a democratic leader: He cannot have his war policy vindicated in an election, as Abraham Lincoln did in 1864, because any election would be a masquerade.In recent years, as authoritarian leaders have gained ground around the world and democracy has decayed, there’s been a fear that these figures have a stronger hand to play than the dictators of the past, because their authoritarianism is gentler and subtler, and also wrapped in the legitimating structures of elections.But Putin’s predicament suggests that this subtler authoritarianism is weaker than its predecessors in a crisis. The 20th century’s totalitarian regimes often co-opted the rhetoric of democracy and nationalism, but at bottom they made their own unique (and dreadful) claims to legitimacy — the people’s republic, the rule of the master race. Putin, lacking any such foundation, cannot just be a proud imperialist or autocrat or revolutionary: He has to legitimize his ambitions in the frameworks of his Western enemies, with absurd results (Ukraine isn’t a real nation, Russia is liberating Ukraine from Nazis, the Russians are fighting for human rights).There are parallels to the internal politics of the United States, where movements tempted toward authoritarianism nevertheless legitimate themselves in the familiar language of democracy. Thus Donald Trump has to claim that the will of the people was thwarted in 2020, not that he had a right to autocratic rule. Likewise, the push from the left to cancel or de-platform, to steer public opinion via censorship, tends to be justified in the name of “safeguarding democracy.”This pattern doesn’t mean there aren’t authoritarian perils in our politics, anymore than Putin’s legitimacy problems make his invasion any less destructive. But it helps to see our crises clearly if you recognize that they’re still happening inside the lines of late modernity — that as Elizabeth II is laid to rest, nothing like her radically un-democratic legitimacy seems ready for rebirth.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Russia Holds First Elections Since Ukraine Invasion

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      Voters are choosing local and regional governments, but the ranks of opposition candidates have been severely depleted by jail and exile.MOSCOW — Russians began voting on Friday in the first nationwide elections since the invasion of Ukraine in a climate of wartime censorship and repression, with the Kremlin trying to assure the public that it was business as usual.The vote for local and regional governments across the country includes the first municipal-level elections in the capital of Moscow since 2017, when the opposition won a sizable minority of seats despite the Kremlin’s dominance of the political system and accusations of fraud. But the ranks of the opposition have since been depleted even further. Many anti-government politicians have fled the country while others have been arrested or blocked from running by the election commissions.“Real competition this year is at one of the lowest rates in a decade,” according to an assessment by a Russian independent elections watchdog, Golos.Although President Vladimir V. Putin has dominated Russian politics for two decades, he has long relied on elections with a semblance of competition to try to legitimize the rule of his United Russia party. And while those elections were rife with fraud, the vote-counting process in major cities like Moscow retained a modicum of transparency, making them an opportunity for Kremlin critics to express their discontent even if a major opposition victory was virtually impossible.After the upheaval in Russia’s economy from international sanctions over the Ukraine war and inflation, the question is whether that logic still holds. Mr. Putin has done everything in his power, critics say, to prevent his opponents from being able to repeat even their modest success of five years ago.“Finally for the first time, elections are totally senseless,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Moscow. Almost no one is allowed to participate, he added, referring to the opposition.The election is also a test — albeit a diluted one — of the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny’s ability to influence Russian politics from prison.Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, in a video link from prison for a court hearing this month.Dmitry Serebryakov/Associated PressMr. Navalny’s exiled team of advisers recommended candidates in each of Moscow’s electoral districts to try to defeat the Kremlin’s preferred candidates — a campaign they call “smart voting.” And although the government blocked access to the website listing the recommended candidates, Russians can still access it using a V.P.N. or a smartphone app.The current elections are being held over three days on Friday, Saturday and Sunday — a schedule that Kremlin opponents say makes the vote more vulnerable to fraud because election observers are hard-pressed to monitor the polls for the entire duration. The government is also allowing people to vote online, making it easier to falsify ballots, according to critics.Nearly all regions of the country are choosing either municipal representatives, regional lawmakers or governors or some combination of those offices.Vladimir, a cameraman, was one of the few people voting on Friday at Moscow polling station No. 148, a school in a well-heeled neighborhood. He said he cast his ballot for the incumbent, an independent who promised to address the problem of careless electronic scooter drivers speeding haphazardly along sidewalks in the city center.“This man can work, listen and solve problems that come up,” said Vladimir, 63, outside his polling station. Like other Russian voters interviewed, Vladimir asked that his last name be withheld to protect him from possible retaliation.Still, Vladimir said, he was not confident that the voting process would be transparent.“I don’t like electronic voting,” Vladimir said. “I think manipulation is possible.”Russia has for years cracked down on opposition movements and restricted the space for anti-Kremlin candidates on the national political stage. So opposition leaders have sought smaller roles in local and regional governments where they could still make a difference.But officials have gone to great lengths to block opposition candidates by imprisoning them on accusations of disseminating false information about the Ukraine war or charging them with minor offenses that prohibit them from running.Examining a candidates list at a polling station in Moscow, on Friday.Maxim Shipenkov/EPA, via ShutterstockAndrei Z. Morev, 47, was elected head of the municipal council in Moscow’s central Yakimanka district in 2017, when he and other candidates from the opposition party Yabloko won seven out of eight seats there. He has said that he expected to be re-elected this year.But in August, the local election commission removed him from the list of registered candidates, saying that he was affiliated with an extremist group because he had a sticker on his car promoting smart voting.The smart voting campaign’s website was blocked by the government before the national parliament elections in 2021 because of its affiliation with Mr. Navalny’s organizations, all of which are legally deemed “extremist” by the Russian government.But Mr. Morev said that he has always been critical of Mr. Navalny’s initiative, and that the sticker was planted on his car by two men who then reported it to the police.Mr. Morev said the judge refused to consider CCTV footage that he said showed that the sticker was planted. The judge sentenced him to 15 days in jail, effectively ending his campaign.“They are so afraid of us,” he said, “they don’t want to give people any chance to choose.”Mr. Morev’s party, Yabloko, estimates that one in five of its candidates was prevented from running for various reasons. And some independent candidates who were able to run face external pressures given the climate of fear in Russia today.Yulia Katsenko, 30, is running with a group of independent candidates in her home district of Vostochnoye Biryulyovo in southern Moscow, where Mr. Putin’s United Russia won all seats in the 2017 municipal elections.When she started campaigning, her former employer — a charitable fund affiliated with the state-owned bank Sberbank — pressured her to either quit the campaign or quit her job. She said she argued that she wasn’t a high-profile candidate.“They didn’t care,” she said.So she quit her job and stayed on the campaign trail. Mr. Navalny’s “smart voting” campaign listed Ms. Katsenko among its recommended candidates.Despite the Russian authorities’ crackdown on the opposition, some low-profile critics of the Kremlin and of the Ukraine war remain on the ballot. And while they are unlikely to win, Mr. Navalny’s advisers said they believe the Kremlin would be hard-pressed to paper over a strong showing by some of them that would convey disapproval of the war.“It is very difficult for Moscow to organize some kind of total falsification system at polling stations,” one exiled adviser to Mr. Navalny, Vladimir Milov, said in a phone interview from Vilnius, Lithuania. “I see great enthusiasm from activists, candidates and many voters, and even in these conditions, they want to do something.”Voting at a polling station in Moscow on Friday.Natalia Kolesnikova/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMarina Litvinovich, a political strategist who was a Yabloko candidate for the Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament, in last year’s elections, said that given the total absence of independent print media and strict censorship laws, the election campaign this year serves only one valuable purpose: the opportunity to talk to voters.“My campaign last year showed that, while protests were forbidden and even individual pickets, meetings between voters and candidates were allowed,” she said. “Of course, the elections are not free or fair and people don’t consider them as such,” she added.Some voters said they had doubts that their participation could actually effect change. But for others, voting was an act of protest.“I am planning to vote,” said Anna, a 20-year-old student, who said she wanted to see political change in her country. “It is my duty as a citizen.”She added: “It is hard to believe the elections will be honest. But it is still important to do something — and this is something they can’t arrest you for.”Valerie Hopkins More

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      Captured Ukrainian Oligarch Was Figure in Russian Election Meddling Investigation

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      His name had surfaced as an influential figure in Ukraine with potential inside knowledge of Russian electoral meddling in the United States, though for years he had steadfastly denied it.But in recent days, the ground has shifted dramatically under Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian politician who is a close confidant of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and who had also been a client of the Republican political consultant Paul J. Manafort.Mr. Medvedchuk went into hiding early in the war, Ukrainian officials say, and was detained this week. President Volodymyr Zelensky posted on Tuesday a picture on Telegram of the politician, looking tired and disheveled, wearing handcuffs. He was arrested after violating terms of his house arrest while awaiting trial for treason, in a case opened last year.That case is related to coal trading with pro-Russian separatists, but more broadly it has to do with the swirl of financial and political intrigue surrounding Moscow’s operations to influence politics in foreign countries.For now, it’s unclear whether Mr. Medvedchuk will ever testify in court in Ukraine or be interviewed by investigators looking into Russian influence operations elsewhere. Mr. Zelensky said he would seek to trade Mr. Medvedchuk to Russia for Ukrainian prisoners of war.“I offer the Russian Federation to trade your man for our boys and girls now in captivity,” Mr. Zelensky said. “It’s important our law enforcement and military study such a possibility.”A trade would presumably put Mr. Medvedchuk in Russia, out of reach of researchers tracking Russian attempts to influence political outcomes abroad, in which Mr. Medvedchuk is said to have played a central role in Ukraine.A photo released by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office Tuesday shows Viktor Medvedchuk in handcuffs after he was detained.Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, via Associated PressHis relevance to Russian electoral meddling in the United States related to his ties to Mr. Manafort, and he was not described as playing a central role in a special prosecutor’s report or in two federal trials of Mr. Manafort.Still, Mr. Medvedchuk has been close both politically and personally to Mr. Putin for more than two decades, and he was a prominent figure in the pro-Russian wing of Ukrainian politics, a circle where Mr. Manafort found several clients.Mr. Putin is the godfather to Mr. Medvedchuk’s daughter. The two men met frequently over the years, and Russian air traffic control authorities granted special exemptions for Mr. Medvedchuk’s private jet on flights to Moscow, he said in an interview in 2017.Some European politicians, including the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, had publicly endorsed a role for Mr. Medvedchuk as an intermediary in the standoff between Russia and Ukraine, given his personal ties to Mr. Putin.But in Ukraine, outside of a narrow base of support mostly in the country’s east, he was widely viewed as a loathsome quisling who had reaped wealth from energy deals with the Kremlin while promoting Russian foreign policy goals, including weakening the central government under a federalization overhaul that he had championed for years.At various times, he had served as deputy speaker of Parliament, a presidential adviser and a negotiator in prisoner exchanges with Russia. And as a figure at the nexus of various financial and political influence operations run by the Kremlin, Mr. Medvedchuk’s importance extended beyond Ukraine.Mr. Manafort, before he became chairman of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, worked for a decade as a consultant for Russian-leaning politicians in Ukraine, including the Opposition Bloc party, in which Mr. Medvedchuk was one of three leading figures.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4U.S. support. More

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      In Russia Election Results, Online Votes Sweep Putin Opponents Aside

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      The official tally gave a strong parliamentary majority to President Vladimir V. Putin’s United Russia party. Opposition leaders cried foul, pointing to earlier signs of gains.MOSCOW — Russia’s ruling party retained a two-thirds majority in the lower house of Parliament and claimed a sweeping victory in opposition-minded Moscow — a stark display of Kremlin power as the authorities on Monday announced the results of a nationwide parliamentary election that opposition leaders denounced as blatantly falsified.Partial results released after the polls closed on Sunday evening had shown significant gains by opposition parties and potential victories by several candidates supported by the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. But by the time Russia’s Central Election Commission revealed a nearly full count on Monday, those gains were largely gone — prompting anger from Kremlin critics, claims of large-scale fraud and scattered calls for protests.Russian elections are not free and fair, and the country’s best known opposition figures were barred from the ballot, jailed or exiled in the months before the three-day-long vote that ended on Sunday. But Mr. Navalny’s allies had hoped to use a coordinated protest vote in the election to deliver a rebuke to President Vladimir V. Putin.The focal point of the opposition’s anger on Monday was the Russian capital, a stronghold of anti-Kremlin sentiment where the government had urged voters to cast their ballots online. Challengers to the ruling party, United Russia, led in several electoral districts before the results of online voting were tabulated, with a delay, on Monday. Soon after, the election commission declared the pro-Kremlin candidate the victor in each of those districts.As a result, the ruling United Russia party swept to a dominant performance and kept its two-thirds “supermajority” in the lower house of Parliament, the Duma — all despite recording approval ratings below 30 percent in recent polls published by state-run research groups. The party received 50 percent of the vote with 52 percent turnout — and won 198 of the 225 seats apportioned in direct, single-district elections.“We’ve never had a voting process that we didn’t know anything about,” Roman Udot, a co-head of Golos, an independent election monitoring group, said of Moscow’s online voting system. “There’s some kind of big, big skeleton in the closet here.”An official in the Moscow city government explained the delay in the tabulation of online votes by pointing to a “decoding” process that took “considerably longer than we had expected,” the Interfax news agency reported.Mr. Navalny said in a social media message from prison that the delay in releasing online voting results allowed “the deft little hands” of United Russia officials to “fake the results to the exact opposite.” The Communist Party, which came in second nationwide and in several of the disputed district-level races in the capital, said it would not recognize the online voting results in Moscow.Graffiti depicting the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny in St. Petersburg in April. Anton Vaganov/ReutersBut it was not clear what, if anything, critics of the outcome could do about the situation. The judiciary is under the thumb of the Kremlin, while prominent opposition figures are exiled or behind bars. Street protests are increasingly punished by jail terms.In all, the outcome further demonstrated Mr. Putin’s strengthening lock on political life — and served, perhaps, as a dress rehearsal for the presidential election of 2024, in which Mr. Putin could seek a fifth term.“For the president, the main thing was and remains the competitiveness, openness and honesty of the elections,” Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters on Monday. “We, of course, assess the electoral process very, very positively.”Kremlin critics had been warning for weeks that online voting could open up new avenues for fraud, since the tabulation process was even less transparent than the counting of paper ballots.On Monday, the Communists called for protests, but the Moscow authorities quickly denied them a permit because of pandemic-related restrictions, according to state news agencies. Leonid Volkov, a top aide to Mr. Navalny who has been trying to coordinate opposition votes from exile, stopped short of urging people out into the streets but said that he and his colleagues would support “any peaceful protest actions” that could help overturn the results.Television images on Monday showed police trucks massing at central Moscow’s Pushkin Square, but it was not clear whether any protests would materialize.“The Kremlin took this step because it was certain it could get away with it,” Mr. Volkov said in a post on the messaging app Telegram. “Putin decided that he need not be afraid of the street. Whether or not he’s right — we’ll find out.”Oleg Matsnev More

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      How Investigative Journalism Flourished in Hostile Russia

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Aleksei NavalnyNavalny’s Life in OppositionKremlin AnxietyCourt DecisionWhat Will Yulia Navalnaya Do?Putin’s ‘Palace’AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storythe media equationHow Investigative Journalism Flourished in Hostile RussiaA new wave of news outlets has used conventional, and unconventional, methods to pierce the veil of Putin’s power.Roman Dobrokhotov, the founder of The Insider, one of a wave of new investigative news outlets in Russia, said that Russia “is possibly the most transparent country in the world.”Credit…Pierre Crom/Getty ImagesFeb. 21, 2021Updated 5:25 p.m. ETThe Russian language has introduced a few words that in recent years have been widely used and misused in English: disinformation, kompromat, Novichok.But the one that blows my mind is “probiv.” It’s drawn from the word that means “to pierce” — or to enter something into a search bar. Today, it refers to the practice by which anyone can buy, for a couple of dollars on the social media app Telegram or hundreds on a dark web marketplace, the call records, cellphone geolocation or air travel records of anyone in Russia you want to track. Probiv is purchased by jealous spouses or curious business partners, and criminals of various sorts. But it has also been used recently, and explosively, by journalists and political activists, overlapping categories in Russia, where the chief opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, often makes use of the tools of investigative journalism.Probiv is only one of the factors that have made Russia, of all places, the most exciting place in the world for investigative journalism. There is a new wave of outlets, many using more conventional sourcing to pierce the veil of President Vladimir V. Putin’s power. And there is a growing online audience for their work in a country where the state controls, directly or indirectly, all of the major television networks.The boom in independent journalism and criticism of the government has reached a level “unseen in our country since the end of the 1990s,” Denis Volkov, the deputy director of the Levada Center, a Russian public opinion research group, wrote recently.Probiv has been a crucial part of that revival. The practice was at the heart of a stunning revelation late last year by the international investigative collective Bellingcat, working with the Russian site The Insider and other partners, identifying the agents from a secret Russian spy unit who poisoned Mr. Navalny. A reporter spent “a few hundred euros worth of cryptocurrency” for a trove of data. Then, in a riveting piece of theater, Mr. Navalny, working with Bellingcat, called one of those agents, pretending to be a senior government official, and tricked him into a confession. When Mr. Navalny returned to Russia after his treatment in Germany, he was promptly jailed for a parole violation in a case he has called fabricated, and now faces transport to a penal colony.The irony is delicious, of Mr. Putin seeing his own tools of corruption and surveillance turned against him by the underpaid police and intelligence officials who put the secrets up for sale. “Whatever Putin does keeps backfiring,” said Maria Pevchikh, who runs the investigative unit at Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.Aleksei Navalny, the chief opposition leader to President Vladimir Putin, at a court hearing in Moscow this month. He faces transport to a penal colony.Credit…Babushkinsky District CourtProbiv is almost exclusively a Russian phenomenon. When Roman Dobrokhotov, who founded The Insider in 2013, was in Kyiv a couple of years ago, he said he asked a local journalist where he could find the phone records for someone he was researching and was surprised to learn that wasn’t a common practice. He said he realized that “Russia is possibly the most transparent country in the world,” adding, “If you have 10 bucks, you can find any information on anyone.”The New York Times and some other major Western outlets don’t use probiv, on the principle that you shouldn’t pay for stolen information. Many Russian journalists debate the ethics and legality of it as well. Bellingcat’s probiv maestro, Christo Grozev, has said he spent his own money — the independent news site Meduza estimated it at more than $13,000 — unmasking murderous Russian spies. (He told The Washington Post that his vendor assumed he was a criminal, and was horrified to learn he was a journalist.) Mr. Dobrokhotov said he wouldn’t buy probiv himself, but had analyzed the data Mr. Grozev purchased. (CNN and Der Spiegel also collaborated on the investigation of Mr. Navalny’s poisoning.) Other reporters said it’s routine to use for research, but not to cite in a finished article. But for some, those norms are shifting, too.“The audience doesn’t care whether you bought data or got it from a source,” said Roman Anin, the founder of iStories, a nonprofit Russian investigative site with a staff of 15. He said he had concluded that “since we live in a country where authorities are killing opposition leaders, let’s forget about these rules, because these stories are more important than our ethical rules.”A bot on Telegram that offers to identify the owner of any car.Credit…The New York TimesThat portal into Vladimir Putin’s world has opened even as some American journalists covering Russian interference in the 2016 election produced overheated essays and viral Twitter threads. They cast Mr. Putin, in the American imagination, as an all-powerful puppet master and everyone whose name ends in the letter “v” as his agent. But it was actual Russians, running their websites on the margins of legality or from abroad, who opened windows into Mr. Putin’s real Russia. And what they’ve uncovered is unbelievable personal corruption, shadowy figures behind international political interference and murderous but sometimes inept security services.Here are a few examples of these revelations:The investigative nonprofit outlet Proekt identified Mr. Putin’s “secret family,” and found that the woman it linked to the president had acquired some $100 million in wealth from sources tied to the Russian state.IStories used a trove of hacked emails to document how Mr. Putin’s former son-in-law built a huge fortune out of state connections.Bellingcat, which was founded in London, and the Russia-based Insider identified, by name and photograph, the Russian agents who poisoned the defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in 2018.The media group RBC delved into the political machinery behind the troll farm interfering in U.S. elections.Meduza exposed deep corruption in all corners of the Moscow city government, down to the funeral business.Mr. Navalny’s foundation flew drones over Mr. Putin’s palace, a vast estate on the Black Sea that Mr. Navalny labeled “the World’s Biggest Bribe” in a scathing, mocking nearly two-hour video he released on his return to Russia last month. The video has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.There’s a tendency in parts of the American media right now to reflexively decry the rise of alternative voices and open platforms on social media, seeing them solely as vectors for misinformation or tools of Donald J. Trump. Russia is a potent reminder of the other side of that story, the power of these new platforms to challenge one of the world’s most corrupt governments. That’s why, for instance, Mr. Navalny was a vocal critic of Twitter’s decision to ban Mr. Trump, calling it an “unacceptable act of censorship.”The new Russian investigative media is also resolutely of the internet. And much of it began with Mr. Navalny, a lawyer and blogger who created a style of YouTube investigation that draws more from the lightweight, meme-y formats of that platform than from heavily produced documentaries or newsmagazine investigations.Mr. Navalny doesn’t cast himself as a journalist. “We are using investigative reporting as a tool to achieve our political ends,” his aide, Ms. Pevchikh, said. (One convention they don’t follow: getting comment from the target of an investigation.) Indeed, his relationship with the independent journalists can be complicated. Most are careful to maintain their identity as independent actors, not activists. They criticize him, but also message him their stories, hoping he’ll promote them to his own vast audience, and he publicly criticizes them, in turn, for being too soft on the Kremlin.The new news outlets learned from Mr. Navalny as well. Many of them have imitated his style on YouTube. And he proved that certain lines could be crossed. What’s more, they all undoubtedly benefit from the homogeneity of the television networks. Imagine how much YouTube you would watch if the only news channels available were Fox News, Newsmax and OAN.The traffic they see online also tells them they’re connecting.For Roman Badanin, the founder of Proekt, reporting on Mr. Putin’s hidden life has been a career-long obsession.Credit…James Hill for The New York Times“I see the numbers and I think that all this is not in vain,” said Roman Badanin, the founder of Proekt, for whom Mr. Putin’s hidden life has been a career-long obsession. (A confusingly high percentage of the founders of these new outlets are named Roman.) In a particularly surreal moment this month, the young woman who Proekt suggested was Mr. Putin’s daughter said — in a conversation on the social audio app Clubhouse with the reporter who wrote the article — that she was “grateful” for all the attention his reporting had brought … to her Instagram account.Mr. Badanin, who modeled Proekt on the American nonprofit news organization ProPublica, said he had begun to see another sign of intense interest: financial support from his audience. About a third of the budget that supports a staff of 12, he said, now comes from donations averaging $8, mirroring the global trend toward news organizations relying on their readers. In Russia, some of this is still nascent. For instance, a colleague in Russia, Anton Troianovski, tells me that there’s a cafe near the Kurskaya Metro station where you can add to your bill a donation to MediaZona, which was founded by two members of the protest group Pussy Riot to hold the Russian justice system to account. But the protests against Mr. Navalny’s imprisonment also seem to be driving support for independent media, a phenomenon that The Bell, another of the new independent websites, christened “the Navalny Effect.”That might help these outlets navigate a narrowing legal window in Mr. Putin’s decades-long game of cat-and-mouse with independent journalism. (The government is also struggling to balance its citizens’ love of the open internet with the threat it can pose to government power.)Many of the new outlets, along with BBC Russia, have drawn talent from a previous wave of independent voices that the government effectively put out of the investigations business. Some of the new outlets, like the Latvia-based Meduza, have their operations abroad. But many are incorporated overseas, even as their journalists live and work in Moscow. Some subsist on grants whose sources they keep confidential — a vulnerability the Russian government appears likely to exploit under a new law broadening restrictions on what it considers “foreign agents.”MediaZona’s editor, Sergei Smirnov, center, at a hearing at the Moscow City Court this month. He was arrested for retweeting a joke with an image that included the date and time of a protest.Credit…Moscow City Court Press OfficeIndeed, the sense of possibility is rivaled only by the sense of menace. Virtually every journalist I spoke to in Russia said they expected this period to end at any moment. In a particularly ominous sign, police arrested the editor of MediaZona, Sergei Smirnov, on Jan. 30 for retweeting a joke with an image that included the date and time of a protest. He was sentenced to 15 days in jail for violating the rules on holding public events, and journalists debated whether it was an incompetent mistake or a deliberate warning to his peers.“To be an independent journalist in Russia is like being a lobster in a pot,” said Meduza’s editor in chief, Ivan Kolpakov. “They are boiling you, but you don’t know exactly when you will die.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More