Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what's ahead. To receive The Week In Russia newsletter in your inbox, click here.

A gruesome video adds to apparent evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Accounts of “terrifying torture” during the occupation of Kherson expand with a Human Rights Watch report. And in Russia, a Kremlin opponent faces a verdict in a treason trial widely condemned as a farce.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

'Barbaric Acts'

When it comes to Russia’s war against Ukraine and the oppressive atmosphere in Russia itself, sometimes it seems like things just couldn’t get any worse.

And then they do, again and again.

This week, a video that appeared to show Russian forces beheading a captive Ukrainian soldier caused outrage in Ukraine and the West. If authentic, the video adds to the growing pile of evidence of atrocities committed by Russia and its troops since President Vladimir Putin ordered the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Czech President Petr Pavel said that if the video is real, “it will mean that Russian soldiers are on par with the Islamic State. This is something that…all of us universally should condemn."

Pavel, a former senior NATO official, noted that “the Russian Armed Forces have committed a whole range of barbaric acts on Ukraine's territory which have already been documented.”

Circulation of the video occurred against a backdrop of daily death and destruction wreaked by Russia on Ukraine and its people. An 11-year-old girl in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhya and her father, 50, were among at least five civilians killed in Russian attacks over the weekend, Ukrainian authorities said.

Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, added to already mounting evidence that Russian forces who seized the southern city of Kherson soon after the invasion operated a “torture center” and several similar facilities in the area before it was liberated and they retreated across the Dnieper River in November.

"Russian occupying forces carried out terrifying torture and other abuses against Kherson residents in the torture center on Teploenerhetykiv Street and numerous other detention facilities," Yulia Gorbunova, senior Ukraine researcher at HRW, said as the group issued its report on April 13.

Ukrainians who were held at the facilities during the occupation “consistently reported similar forms of abuse, including severe beatings with sticks and rubber batons, electric shocks, threats of death or mutilation, and use of painful stress positions,” HRW said. “No adequate medical care was provided to detainees.”

Kherson is the only regional capital Russian forces have seized since the February 2022 invasion. Their withdrawal was one of several setbacks they have suffered in an assault that Putin is widely believed to have expected would bring Ukraine to its knees within days -- or a few weeks at most.

Almost 14 months later, predictions made out in the open and in secret suggest the war is unlikely to end this year and could go on far longer.

A Jailed Journalist

In Russia, a state clampdown on dissent, political opposition, independent media, and civil society that can be traced back to numerous points in time since Putin first came to power nearly a quarter-century ago had intensified in 2021, with the arrest of Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny, and again in 2022, with the large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Like the war, it shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

Unlike the 7 1/2-year period between the Soviet Union’s collapse and his initial appointment as prime minister in 1999, the Putin era has been defined to a large degree by the prosecution of perceived enemies, with politically charged arrests, trials, verdicts, and sentences following one after the other in times of peace and war.

Among other ingredients, the clampdown consists of countless court cases that Kremlin critics charge are motivated by politics or geopolitics. Three of the most prominent prosecutions that are occurring now – each of them at a different stage – paint a picture perhaps bleaker than at any time since the former KGB officer was put in charge of the country.

At least one of them is unprecedented: On March 29, Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was arrested by the KBG’s main successor agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), on espionage charges that his newspaper, his family, and the U.S. government have roundly dismissed as fabricated.

Gershkovich, 31, is the only American journalist to have been arrested and accused of spying in post-Soviet Russia. He is being held at Lefortovo, a notorious former KGB jail that is associated with Soviet-era repression and is now used by the FSB, and would face a prison sentence of up to 25 years if tried and convicted.

The United States has designated Gershkovich “wrongfully detained,” meaning it sees him as a hostage, and analysts say it’s crystal clear that at least one of the Kremlin’s motives for his arrest is just that: Russia has acquired yet another high-profile hostage for a potential prisoner swap.

Another message: Real reporting on the war in Ukraine and related matters is off-limits, even for accredited foreign correspondents.

Poisoned Again?

The Russian state’s efforts against Navalny are at a more advanced stage, and his treatment in prison is an increasing cause for alarm. The opposition politician was arrested when he returned to Russia in January 2021, after barely surviving a nerve-agent poisoning he blames on Putin and the FSB.

Navalny, 46, has received prison sentences of nine years and 2 ½ years in separate cases he contends were fabricated to punish him for his dissent and to keep him out of elections and off the streets of Russia, where he has joined, led, or helped organize many of the biggest anti-government protests of the past 12 years. From prison, Navalny has denounced Russia’s war on Ukraine.

He has repeatedly been sent to punitive solitary confinement, enduring more than 100 days in such cells since August 2022, and fears for his health have intensified as supporters say he has been denied medical treatment. An ambulance was called on April 7, when he was suffering severe stomach pain, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said.

"Every time we have to fight to make sure that some sort of medical assistance is provided for him, while the prison’s medical personnel inject unknown substances into his body and refuse to tell us what these substances are," Yarmysh said in a video statement posted on social media on April 13.

“We cannot rule out that, right now, they are slowly poisoning Aleksei Navalny -- killing him slowly so as to attract less attention," she said.

Meanwhile, the government is getting ready to imprison another opponent who, like Navalny, returned to Russia from abroad despite the clear risk that he would be targeted for prosecution, arguing that the country is his home -- and he belongs there no matter what.

Prosecutors have asked a Moscow court to sentence Vladimir Kara-Murza, 41, to 25 years in prison on treason charges that stem from his opposition to Putin’s government and his public criticism of its actions, including the invasion of Ukraine. A verdict is expected on April 17.

Kara-Murza “is facing a monstrous prison term for no more than raising his voice and elevating the voices of others in Russia who disagree with the Kremlin, its war in Ukraine, and its escalating repression within Russia,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, which called for his release.

Kara-Murza, who before his April 2022 arrest lived part-time outside Washington, D.C., with his wife and children, believes that two severe illnesses he suffered during visits to Russia, in 2015 and 2017, were the result of intentional poisoning attacks linked to his lobbying for U.S. sanctions against Russian officials allegedly involved in rights abuses.​

'A War Will Be Called A War'

In a final statement at his closed-door trial, which was published in The Washington Post, Kara-Murza began by saying that “after two decades spent in Russian politics, after all that I have seen and experienced, that nothing can surprise me anymore.

“I must admit that I was wrong,” he said. “I’ve been surprised by the extent to which my trial, in its secrecy and its contempt for legal norms, has surpassed even the ‘trials’ of Soviet dissidents in the 1960s and ’70s.”

"In this respect, we’ve gone beyond the 1970s — all the way back to the 1930s," he said, evoking the harrowing times of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s political purges -- the Great Terror.

Like other imprisoned Kremlin opponents, he ended his statement with a message of hope, saying he knows “that the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate.​

The day, he said, “when a war will be called a war, and a usurper a usurper; and when those who kindled and unleashed this war, rather than those who tried to stop it, will be recognized as criminals.”

“And then our society will open its eyes and be horrified by what terrible crimes were committed on its behalf,” he said. “From this realization, from this reflection, the long, difficult but vital path toward the recovery and restoration of Russia, its return to the community of civilized countries, will begin.”

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

Yours,

Steve Gutterman

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what's ahead. To receive The Week In Russia newsletter in your inbox, click here.

President Vladimir Putin threatens to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. An American journalist is arrested on spy charges, a post-Soviet first. A father is separated from his daughter and sentenced to prison after the child is reported for drawings lamenting Russia's war against Ukraine.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Scare Tactics

Since he unleashed the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin and other officials have issued frequent reminders of a fact that cannot fail to affect decisions and actions by Kyiv, Moscow, the West, and more: Russia has nuclear weapons.

While mostly maintaining a level of deniability, Russian authorities have repeatedly raised the specter of the potential use of nuclear weapons -- whether it's a slavering state-TV pundit, former President Dmitry Medvedev fantasizing aloud about bombing the Bundestag in Berlin, or Putin announcing he has ordered new nuclear missiles to be put on combat duty.

Such signaling and saber-rattling is not new. It dates back long before the 2022 invasion, because Russia's nuclear arsenal has always been its best argument for being treated like a superpower, or something close to it, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But the frequency of these remarks seems to have increased over the 13 months since Russian forces invaded Ukraine from the north and east and Russian rockets hit targets across the country on February 24, 2022.

The latest instance, at least for now, came last weekend, when state television released remarks in which Putin said Russia could deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus -- which borders Ukraine and three NATO nations -- by July.

Militarily, analysts said, there would be little point or none at all in Moscow moving some of its estimated 2,000 or so tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus.

"There is no military expediency in this action," Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russia's nuclear arsenal and a senior researcher with the UN Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva, told RFE/RL's Belarus Service.

So why would Putin say he could do it?

Here are a few potential reasons.

Two Words: Nuclear Weapons

Quite simply, Putin may be eager to keep the words ‘nuclear weapons' on people's lips as much as possible, given that Russia's atomic arsenal is its ace-in-the-hole -- particularly in light of the performance of its conventional forces, which are suffering severe losses and making little progress in Ukraine, a situation underscored by the monthlong battle for the Donbas city of Bakhmut.

"I think the starting point for this is that Russia is on its back foot in the war in Ukraine" so Putin feels Moscow "needs to look like it's being tough," Daniel Speckhard, a former senior NATO official and U.S. ambassador to Belarus, told RFE/RL on March 29. "And I think this was the next way to raise the stakes."

With Ukraine expected to launch a counteroffensive in the coming weeks in a bid to take back more of the territory that Russia has occupied in the east and south, Putin may consider it useful to play the nuclear card – or, more accurately, not play it but flash it in from of his opponents' eyes.

Threat Level Unchanged

At the same time, Putin's statement, and even the dispatch of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, if that does occur, enables the Kremlin to keep the implicit warning prominent without necessarily increasing the level of the threat to Ukraine, NATO, and the West.

As The New York Times put it, analysts "pointed out that even if Russia were to transfer some of its warheads, the action wouldn't substantially change the nuclear threat posed by Russia since it can already target a vast range of territory from inside its own borders." Ukraine directly borders Russia in addition to Belarus, and Russia shares borders with NATO nations Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.

U.S. and NATO officials suggested there was no sign of an increased threat of the use of nuclear weapons. NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu called Putin's words "dangerous and irresponsible" but said the alliance has "not seen any changes in Russia's nuclear posture that would lead us to adjust our own."

"We've in fact seen no indication he has any intention to use nuclear weapons, period, inside Ukraine," said U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.

Putin's announcement was "first and foremost for their domestic audience, this looking tough part," Speckhard said.

"But it's also a reminder to the West to not get complacent," he added. "You know, they are on their back foot, their conventional forces have been seriously deteriorated and weakened as a result of this war…and so reminding everybody, ‘Hey, we're a nuclear power,' is a way to try to rebalance what feels like an out-of-balance security situation in Europe right now for Russia."

Pressure To Pressure Ukraine

Many analysts say that amid setbacks on the battlefield in Ukraine, Putin is pinning his hopes on U.S. and European support flagging as time passes and on Western calls for Kyiv to make concessions to Moscow -- rather than pursuing its stated goal of taking back all the territory Russia has occupied since 2014, including Crimea -- gaining traction.

"This is an attempt to destabilize the situation, to frighten those people in the West who have a tendency to be frightened," Arkady Moshes, an expert on the foreign policies of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, told the Belarus Service.

"This decision looks like a continuation of Putin's blackmail, trying to force Western and NATO countries to make compromises on Ukraine," said Belarusian political analyst Artsyom Shraybman, speaking to RFE/RL's Russian Service.

"They are trying to demonstrate that Russia can still raise the stakes in ways that would be dangerous for the West. It is an ultimatum to the West, and Belarus is barely even a player."

Rope Belarus To Russia

"Barely even a player" is an assessment that points to another potential motive for Putin, placing the possible positioning of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus in the context of Moscow's continuing efforts to increase its control over the far smaller neighboring country that is the closest thing it has to an ally.

On paper, Russia and Belarus have been joined together in a "Union State" since the 1990s, but that has little substance, and the authoritarian longtime leader of Belarus, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, has resisted steps toward the kind of integration that could make him little more than a provincial governor.

However, Lukashenka's brutal clampdown on dissent following a deeply disputed 2020 election, as well as his support for Russia's war against Ukraine, have alienated millions of Belarusians and further isolated him from the West, pushing Minsk more tightly into Moscow's embrace.

"In my opinion, the whole idea is primarily political -- to demonstrate the strengthening political union between Belarus and Russia," Podvig told RFE/RL's Belarus Service.

Pavel Luzin, a defense and foreign policy expert who is a visiting scholar at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in the United States, suggested that if Lukashenka believes he would benefit from the placement of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, he is mistaken.

"Lukashenka wants Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus...because he thinks that if Russia deploys them, Moscow will depend on him just has he now depends on Moscow," Luzin told the Belarus Service. "He does not understand that if a nuclear weapons storage facility is opened in Belarus, troops will also be located there…. The consequence of a nuclear-weapons storage facility could be the creation of several permanent Russian military bases."

Anything that could bring Belarus closer to direct involvement in a war is unlikely to be popular in Belarus, which suffered massive death and destruction in World War II. Since he came to power in 1994 -- the year Russia began the first of two deadly military campaigns in Chechnya -- a key to Lukashenka's popularity has been the fact that the country has not been at war.

"In the summer of 2022, according to polls, 80 percent of Belarusians opposed the basing of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus. So in terms of domestic politics, this is a problem for Lukashenka," Shraybman said. "Up until now, he has been able to position himself for many Belarusians as the guarantor of peace and security. Now that will be harder."

The deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus would "certainly have an impact on the further subjugation of the country," Speckhard said.

Exiled opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya said the plan violates the constitution "and grossly contradicts the will of the Belarusian people to assume the non-nuclear state status expressed in the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Belarus of 1990."

Like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, Belarus gave up the nuclear weapons stationed on its territory after it gained independence in the Soviet collapse.

They did so under the Budapest Memorandum, a 1994 deal in which Russia, the United States, and Britain agreed to respect the signatories' independence and sovereignty within their existing borders and refrain from the threat or use of force against them -- pledges torn apart by Moscow with its war against Ukraine.

House Of Horrors

The scale of the horror of the Russian state's war on Ukraine has, naturally, overshadowed its continuing clampdown on political opposition, independent media, civil society, and all forms of dissent at home, which has grown even more intense since the February 2022 invasion.

At least two developments this week underscored that intensity.

On March 30, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested Evan Gershkovich, an American reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and accused him of spying. Putin's spokesman claimed without evidence that he was caught "red-handed," but the newspaper said it "vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter."

Gershkovich, 31, is the only U.S. journalist to be arrested on espionage accusations in Russia since the breakup of the U.S.S.R. In 1986, reporter Nicholas Daniloff was detained in Moscow; he was released 20 days later in a swap for an employee of the Soviet UN mission who had been arrested by the FBI on spying charges.

On March 28, a man whose daughter drew an anti-war picture at school was sentenced to two years in prison under a law signed by Putin days after the invasion that criminalizes words and images deemed by the state to discredit the Russian military amid operations abroad.

Aleksei Moskalyov was sentenced in absentia because he had escaped house arrest shortly before the verdict was handed down, but he was arrested in Minsk less than 48 hours later. His daughter Maria, 13, was taken from their home in the city of Tula in December and placed in a state institution.

The father and daughter's troubles started after Maria drew a picture at school last year depicting a woman standing next to a Ukrainian flag and protecting a child from missiles coming from Russia.

The principal reported her to the police, who later found Internet posts in which Moskalyov condemned the war in Ukraine and displayed a caricature of Putin.

OVD-Info, an NGO that monitors arrests and other form of oppression in Russia, posted what it said was a letter Maria wrote to her father expressing love, support, pride, and concern.

"When you feel bad or you worry, I get sick and feel very bad. I believe that everything will be fine and we will be together," she wrote. "I hope for the best and love you very much."

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

The next edition of The Week In Russia will appear on April 14.

Yours,

Steve Gutterman