The Real Russia. Today. Friday, May 3, 2024

The war in Ukraine

• 🪖 Shoigu says: Russian defense minister claims Ukraine has lost 111,000 troops in 2024
• 🇬🇧 U.K. pledges annual aid to Ukraine for war’s duration: British Foreign Secretary David Cameron has vowed to give Kyiv three billion pounds of military aid annually “for as long as it takes” to win its defensive war against Moscow, Reuters reported on Friday. Cameron also said Ukraine has the right to use U.K.-provided weapons to hit targets on Russian territory. “Just as Russia is striking inside Ukraine, you can quite understand why Ukraine feels the need to make sure it’s defending itself,” he told Reuters. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later responded to Cameron’s statement, calling it a “direct escalation of the tension around the Ukrainian conflict that could potentially pose a threat to [...] Europe’s entire security architecture.”

🪖 A bleak month ahead for Ukraine

In a new interview with The Economist published on Friday, Ukrainian deputy intelligence chief Vadym Skibitsky gives a grim assessment of the situation at the front, calling it “as difficult as [it’s] ever been since the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion” and predicting even worse days ahead.

According to Skibitsky, Russia plans to continue its push to capture the entirety of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions. In the immediate future, he says, the Kremlin has ordered the army to “take something” either by Russia’s Victory Day holiday next Thursday or before Putin’s trip to Beijing the following week. Kyiv’s problem, meanwhile, is “very simple” in Skibitsky’s assessment: “We have no weapons.” Depending on how long its current supplies last, Skibitsky predicts Ukraine will soon lose control of its elevated fortress in Chasiv Yar, which would pave the way for Russia to advance on the rest of the Donetsk region.

Meanwhile, the general says, Russia appears to be preparing for an offensive further north, around Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Sumy regions. He predicts this push will start in “late May or early June.” Altogether, he says, Russia has about 514,000 land troops involved in Ukraine and is set to expand its northern grouping, which currently has about 35,000 people, to about 50,000–70,000. While Skibitsky agrees with other observers that this wouldn’t be enough manpower to capture a major city, he says it “could be enough for a smaller task.”

Skibitsky says that May will be “the key month,” with Russia planning to execute a “three-layered” plan to destabilize Ukraine. The first layer will be a military assault as Moscow seeks to take advantage of the lag between the U.S. Congress approving aid to Ukraine and that aid arriving on the battlefield. At the same time, Russia will wage a disinformation campaign aimed at “undermining Ukrainian mobilization” and Volodymyr Zelensky’s “political legitimacy.” Finally, the Kremlin will ramp up its effort to isolate Ukraine from its allies.

In the long term, Skibitsky says, he doesn’t see a way for the war to end without a treaty; in his assessment, Russia and Ukraine are each fighting to be in “the most favorable position” for potential negotiations, which he doesn’t predict would occur before the latter half of 2025. This is because by early 2026, he says, worker and material shortages will cause Russia’s military production to plateau. However, absent any significant changes — such as Europe increasing defense production to help Ukraine — he says Ukraine will run out of equipment first.

We got The Beet. Don’t miss Meduza’s weekly newsletter (separate from the one you’re reading here)!

💬 Catch this week’s edition → Watch your language: How Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan resist Russia’s linguistic influence

Meanwhile in Russia

• 📰 Rising media repression in Russia and beyond: Reporters Without Borders’s latest Press Freedom Index, published Friday, ranks Russia 164th out of 180 countries, two spots higher than last year. In the report accompanying the index, however, the organization notes that Russia’s overall press freedom score has decreased last year, and its relative rise on the list is only due to the even greater decline of press freedom in other countries in the region. The authors attribute the trend to the “spectacular mimicry of Russian repressive methods” in countries like Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan.
• 🩺 Doctors defend colleague charged over conversation with patient: A group of Russian doctors released a petition on Friday demanding the immediate release of 67-year-old pediatrician Nadezhda Buyanova, who was charged in March with spreading “disinformation” about the Russian military. The charges came after Buyanova was reported to police by a soldier’s widow who said the doctor told her (during her son’s appointment) that all Russian soldiers are “legitimate targets” for Ukraine. Buyanova has denied saying this.

📉 How Russia is trying to combat ruble devaluation — and why even the government doubts it will be enough (11-min read)

In late April, the Russian government extended a decree requiring exporters to exchange most of their foreign currency earnings for rubles on the domestic market. Officially, these measures aim to “preserve the stability of the exchange rate.” However, despite these efforts, forecasts for the ruble paint a grim picture. Although the currency has somewhat stabilized at around 90 rubles to the dollar, even Russia’s own Economic Development Ministry predicts a potential weakening to 100 to the dollar by next year. Meduza explains what Russia is doing to combat ruble devaluation and what economists think about the effectiveness of these measures.

👩🏼‍💼 Nastya Ivleeva reflects on the ‘Almost Naked’ party

Nastya Ivleeva, the TV presenter and blogger whose star-studded “almost naked” party in Moscow sparked a national scandal in December, sat down for an interview with Russian YouTuber Luka Yebkov. The conversation marks the first time that Ivleeva, whose once-irreverent public persona quickly turned deferential in the face of the authorities’ crackdown in response to her party, has spoken at such length about last year’s debacle.

In the interview, Ivleeva agrees with her critics that “some ethical standards were violated” at the party, but maintains that the “harassment” and “denunciations” she and other participants faced went too far. Ivleeva also says she visited occupied Ukraine in March — an act that’s become something of a public ritual in recent years for Russian celebrities seeking to show repentance — but that she chose not to publicize it (until now, evidently). “The Donbas isn’t a laundromat,” she says, adding that it’s “impossible not to be affected by Mariupol,” where “new life is being born from ruins.”

In April, a Moscow court fined Ivleeva the equivalent of about $560 for “discrediting” the Russian army over a two-year-old Instagram post in which she called for peace and compromise. Asked about this in the interview, she calls the episode “irrelevant,” arguing that she had “no understanding or even the slightest knowledge of basic history” at the time. 

The blogger also denies having ever supported opposition politician Alexey Navalny. In February, when she announced on social media that she planned to vote for Vladimir Putin in Russia’s presidential “election,” multiple media outlets noted that she had made an Instagram post wishing Navalny a speedy recovery following his poisoning by the Russian authorities in 2020. Commenting on the post in hindsight, Ivleeva says she made it at a time when she didn’t have her own opinion and was “subject to mainstream trends.”

Asked what she would say to Vladimir Putin if she had the chance, Ivleeva replies: “What can I help you with?”

No country can be free without independent media. In January 2023, the Russian authorities outlawed Meduza, banning our work in the country our colleagues call home. Just supporting Meduza carries the risk of criminal prosecution for Russian nationals, which is why we’re turning to our international audience for help. Your assistance makes it possible for thousands of people in Russia to read Meduza and stay informed. Consider a small but recurring contribution to provide the most effective support. Donate here.