Tag: Bumaga (news website)

He Left Russia with Steinbeck in His Rucksack

Gregory Kunis. Photo: Bumaga via Mr. Kunis’s Facebook page

Gregory Kunis, cofounder of iGooods and former owner of the newspaper Moy Rayon (“My District”), has left Russia following the prosecution’s appeal against the verdict in the Anti-Corruption Foundation donations case, he announced on his Facebook page last night.

Kunis writes that on 12 December, the prosecution lodged an appeal against his sentence on the grounds that the punishment was “excessively lenient.” On 8 December, the Petrograd District Court fined him 350,000 rubles in connection with the donations case, our correspondent reported. Kunis was released from custody in the courtroom. The prosecution had sought a six-year prison sentence in a medium security facility.

The court’s website states that, on 15 December, the prosecution’s appeal was taken under consideration. Kunis decided “not to tempt fate” and fled Russia.

“My motherland let me go carrying a small rucksack, which contained a laptop, a change of clothes, a book (Steinbeck), and toiletries. I’m not angry with her. After all, she did let me go.”

The businessman was arrested on 24 July and charged with “financing an extremist group” for making monthly donations of 500 rubles to [the late Alexei Navalny’s] Anti-Corruption Foundation, donations which continued for some time after the Foundation had been designated an “extremist organization.” Kunis pleaded guilty.

Kunes owned the newspaper Moy Rayon from 2003 to 2014. In 2015, he founded the grocery delivery service iGooods. He was among the first organizers of the Immortal Regiment march in Petersburg. The businessman was arrested on 24 July and later remanded in custody.

Source: Bumaga (Facebook), 18 December 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Are the rumors true that the company iGooods was “stolen” from its founder, Gregory Kunis, while he was in pretrial detention facing political charges? We spoke with the business’s new beneficiary to get both sides of the story.

One of the first grocery delivery services in Russia, iGooods (which has been around since 2015) came under the control of entrepreneur Roman Yarovsky while its founder, Gregory Kunis, was under arrest in connection with the Anti-Corruption Foundation donations case, Bumaga reported earlier. The two sides disagree about how honestly the deal came off and whether politics was a factor.

Kunis’s story is that iGooods urgently needed infusions of cash in 2025. In July of that year, Gregory and his brother Dmitry transferred 50% of the company to a new investor, Roman Yarovsky, who was obliged to preserve the business and the agreed-upon stakes in it of all its shareholders, including Kunis. Subsequently, Gregory was arrested, and the company’s new director, Alexander Bolotnikov, who had replaced Kunis under Yarovsky’s watch, was among the people who testified against him. The new owner “took advantage of the situation” and transferred 100% of the company’s shares to a new legal entity in which none of the previous owners had a stake.

These details (except for Bolotnikov’s incriminating testimony) were corroborated by Yarovsky, but he interprets them differently.

Yavorsky’s story is that, in July 2025, iGooods was in debt to its employees and business partners. Roman took over management of the business. The ownership transfer process took 45 days, but, according to Yavorsky, he began investing money immediately.

“My partner Roman Chubey and I spent about 17 million rubles [approx. 198,000 euros—TRR]. It took about three days: we had just changed ownership and submitted the paperwork when the ‘mask show’ [police carrying out a raid] arrived. They turned the whole office upside down and confiscated all the servers. Do you know what Federal Law No. 115 [the Law on Combating Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing] is? We were told that our former director had apparently been sponsoring an extremist organization, so the business would be shut down. […] I asked [the law enforcement officers] to give us at least a couple of weeks. They agreed. We managed to transfer our business operations to another company [“Global iGoods”],” Yavorsky claims.

According to Yarovsky, none of the old shareholders got a stake in the new company because Kunis was under investigation and thus a danger to the new company, while the other owners allegedly failed to show up for a shareholders’ meeting which, interestingly, had been held only about a month earlier.

“What else could I do in such a situation? I had to save the capital I had invested,” Yarovsky concludes.

Kunis argues that this claim is far-fetched: at the time the criminal case was opened, he no longer had any formal connection to the legal entity and could not have posed a threat to it. Yarovsky claims that the business transfer paperwork was still being processed by the tax inspectorate when the company’s offices were raided and Kunis was detained. Yarovsky was unable to provide us with documents corroborating that a search had taken place and that he had received threats from law enforcement.

What is at stake? According to public records, the company that owns iGooods was profitable but financially unstable in 2024. According to RBC Petersburg, by 2025, employee salaries began to be delayed due to a shortage of cash flow. According to Kunis, one of the key causes of the downturn was a competitive market and the shift of some customers to large companies that subsidized their services.

The new legal entity, Global iGoods, is currently continuing the operations of the iGooods service, which delivers groceries from four stores in Petersburg, including the upscale Super Babylon.

Who is Yavorsky? He is known as one of the shareholders of the Deti group of companies, which operated the large Deti (“Children”) Zdorovy Malysh (“Healthy Baby”) sore chains. The group was declared bankrupt due to its debts, so Yavorsky himself cannot own the new business. His daughter Pelageya was formally named the holder of the initial 50% stake in iGooods.

Elena Chubey (who shares the same last name as Roman Yavorsky’s partner) currently owns 100% of the shares in the new LLC.

Source: Bumaga (Facebook), 25 December 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

I am Gregory Kunis. Until recently I lived in St. Petersburg, where I built my career in media and business. I built projects such as the St. Petersburg Times and Moj Rajon, and later worked in technology, including the grocery delivery service iGoods. I was not a political activist. I lived an ordinary professional life and assumed I was beneath the radar of the Russian state.

That illusion ended when I was arrested in July last year for donating the equivalent of 35 euros to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. I spent five months in pretrial detention. After my release I still faced an appeal by prosecutors — who thought my fine of 350,000 roubles ($4,500) was too lenient — and the possibility of a six-year sentence. On the day I was freed I left Russia. I now live in Israel, separated from my family for the time being, trying to rebuild a life from almost nothing.

I am writing this diary because I want to describe Russia from the inside, not through slogans or geopolitics, but through lived experience. Many people abroad see only the surface and conclude that repression works mainly through open terror, or that support for the war is simple and voluntary. But fear is only part of the story. Uncertainty is just as important. When the state keeps shifting the boundaries of punishment, people begin to censor themselves before anyone has to order them to. That is the mechanism I want to describe: how a system reshapes people inwardly, and how apparently bureaucratic institutions are used to break resistance.

One of the clearest examples is the Russian pretrial detention system, the SIZO. If you want to understand how recruitment to the war works, you have to begin there.

The first day in detention is designed to strip you of time, dignity and control. The prison transport is cramped and airless. There are no windows, almost no ventilation, and long periods of waiting in heat and foul air. You are moved like cargo. Then come the holding cells, where eight or 12 people may be packed together in a tiny space, with bad water, almost no food, cigarette smoke, and no explanation of what is happening. There are no clocks. No one tells you what will happen next or when. You are taken to one short procedure, then sent back to wait again. The language around you is reduced to orders. By the end of the day, after interrogation, dry rations, and hurried processing in the middle of the night, you are physically and mentally emptied out. Long after midnight you are placed in a dark cell not knowing where you are, who is with you, what the rules are, or what will become of you.

Then comes quarantine, the first stage of detention, which is far worse than what follows. The conditions are harsher than in the later stages of custody: crowded cells, barred windows, almost no fresh air, no walks, no shower, no books, no news, and no contact with the outside world. You are allowed one letter, with no certainty that it will arrive. The deepest burden is not only physical discomfort, but isolation. You don’t know what is happening to your loved ones, and they don’t know what is happening to you.

In such conditions, time itself starts to dissolve. Without clocks, without movement, without normal daily markers, the day loses structure. Prisoners improvise ways to follow the sun just to recover some minimal sense of reality. This uncertainty is not an accidental by-product of the system. It is one of its main instruments. A person deprived of information, rhythm, privacy, and contact becomes easier to control.

It is precisely during these first days, when people have been stripped of strength, information, and emotional stability, that recruitment for the war takes place.

This is one of the most important things I want to record. The offer is presented as an escape: sign the contract, go to war, and leave prison behind. In that moment, the choice is not experienced as a political decision. It is experienced as a way out of unbearable confinement. By my reckoning about 30 percent agree immediately, and another 10 percent say they may agree later, once they better understand their likely sentence and future prospects. That is a striking figure, but it should not be misunderstood. It does not prove that these people are ideologically committed to the war. It shows how the state exploits exhaustion, fear and disorientation.

In such a condition, almost any exit begins to look reasonable. Moral judgment is pushed aside by something more primitive: the need to escape. The dangers of combat, the meaning of the war, and even basic ethical questions become secondary to the immediate desire to get out. The person is no longer choosing freely between prison and military service. He is making a decision after being systematically reduced to a state of weakness and despair.

That is why recruitment in detention cannot be understood through propaganda alone. Posters, patriotic rhetoric and official television are only part of the story. The deeper mechanism is institutional. It lies in the sleepless nights, the sealed windows, the bad air, the missing clock, the silence from home, and the unending uncertainty about what comes next. That is where many decisions are actually made. The state takes people at their weakest moment and converts brokenness into manpower.

This is also why I believe it is important to write. Systems like this do not survive by violence alone. They survive by learning how far a person can be bent before he gives way. They survive by turning despair into compliance. If I want readers outside Russia to understand how the war is sustained, I have to show not only the battlefield or the speeches from Moscow, but also the prison cell and the mechanisms operating inside it.

As for me, I do not believe I will return to Russia. I am listed there as a terrorist, my bank accounts are blocked, and I cannot imagine building a normal life under those conditions even if I were physically free. But I can still write. My hope is simple: to leave an honest record of how this system works from the inside, and to help others see more clearly how fear, uncertainty and war are connected. If I do that, I will have succeeded.

Source: Gregory Kunis, “How fear recruits for war,” The Russia Report 300, 8 May 2026

By April 2026, according to Mediazona’s count, at least 225 criminal cases had been opened across Russia over donations to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) made after it was banned as “extremist” in August 2021. The true figure is almost certainly higher: the courts, our main source, do not always publish enough information to distinguish ACF transfers from funding of other “extremist organisations.”

2025 was a record year for the number of ACF donor cases reaching the courts, and the pace of prosecutions has not slowed this year. Here is what we know about the state of the crackdown as of today.

By the spring of 2026, at least 225 criminal cases had been opened in Russia on charges of “financing extremism” (Article 282.3 of the Russian Criminal Code) over donations made to the ACF after the foundation was banned in the summer of 2021. Mediazona established this figure from press releases issued by law enforcement agencies, court records and statements from the defendants themselves.

We have documented such cases in 64 Russian regions, from Kaliningrad in the West to Sakhalin in the Far East. The highest number is in Moscow (25 cases), followed by Sverdlovsk Region (17) and Kaliningrad Region (13).

Of the 225 cases known to us, 187 have been filed in court. There are a total of 190 court cases related to ACF donations, but three of them do not involve ordinary donors: the prosecutions of Leonid Volkov, Alexei Navalny, “Navalny Live” staff member Daniel Kholodny, and the foundation’s investigator Sergei Ezhov. We include these in the chart of cases filed in court, but not in the overall statistics.

Last year set a record for the number of ACF donor cases in the courts. In 2022 there were only two such cases; four in 2023; and 27 in 2024. In 2025 we recorded 131 criminal cases. In the first months of 2026 we have found a further 23, and it is already clear the total by year’s end will be considerably higher.

Our tally includes only those cases in which we could reliably confirm that the defendant was being tried for transfers to the ACF rather than to another “extremist organisation”—religious groups such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the vaguely-defined gang-culture movement A.U.E., and others. 

It is often only possible to determine exactly where a defendant sent money several months after the verdict. This means 225 cases is a conservative estimate, since the courts are reluctant to share information about ongoing trials.

For this reason, in the majority of “financing of extremism” case filed in courts in 2026, it is not yet possible to establish to whom the defendant transferred money. The rise in the number of unidentified Article 282.3 cases in the courts coincides with the rise in ACF cases, suggesting that a significant share of them do in fact concern the ACF, even if we cannot yet confirm this.

To date, we are aware of 167 convictions linked to the ACF’s fundraising. As before, judges typically impose non-custodial sentences: more than 85% of defendants have avoided prison.

Fines are the most common punishment, handed down to 114 people. By Mediazona’s calculations, the total value of those fines has reached nearly 40 million roubles (about $527,000), while the donations that triggered the prosecutions amount to roughly 400,000 roubles (about $5,270).

One of the cases that ended in a fine is particularly notable because, for the first time, the text of the verdict revealed how law enforcement and Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial intelligence watchdog, track down ACF donors.

In December 2025, the Petrogradsky District Court of St. Petersburg fined businessman Gregory Kunis 350,000 roubles ($4,640) for donations to the ACF. The agencies involved in the case were the FSB and Rosfinmonitoring, which has access to all bank transactions in Russia. A deputy head of the financial investigations department of Rosfinmonitoring’s Northwest Federal District office testified for the trial. He first mentioned an FSB request regarding Kunis personally, then explained that after the ACF was designated an “extremist organisation”, Rosfinmonitoring and law enforcement had jointly carried out a financial investigation into the merchant account with the identifier V2NI29SJROMGYKY in order to identify those who had transferred money to it.

The account with merchant ID V2NI29SJROMGYKY is cited in almost every donor case apart from the earliest ones: it is through this identifier that investigators prove the defendant sent money to Navalny’s foundation.

This witness testimony proves that search for ACF donors is being run centrally, with Rosfinmonitoring working alongside the security services. You can read more about the investigation into the donation cases in Mediazona’s first article on the topic.

Of the cases Mediazona has been able to review, 24 defendants received suspended sentences. A further five were sentenced to compulsory labour.

Another 24 defendants received prison sentences (four of them in absentia). The charge of “financing extremism” carries a maximum of eight years’ imprisonment, but the courts have yet to reach the upper limit where that was the sole charge.

Half of the custodial sentences have been handed down in Moscow. ACF donors in the capital have until now been punished significantly more harshly than those in the regions—but in recent months, Moscow judges have started behaving less predictably.

On a single day, March 2, the Timiryazevsky Court fined an IT entrepreneur for donating to the ACF while the Meshchansky Court sentenced Alexei Buchnev, a former Central Bank employee, to three years in prison. The following day, the Butyrsky Court sentenced one of Buchnev’s colleagues to compulsory labour. Two weeks later, on March 16, the Savelovsky Court fined Dmitry Nyudlchiev, an employee of a Rosatom subsidiary. The next day, the IT specialist Alexei Yekaterinin was sentenced to four years in prison by the Perovsky Court.

Why the courts hand down such wildly different punishments is unclear. It does not depend on the size of the donations: for transfers of the same 2,100 roubles (about $28) in total, one Moscow resident received a fine and another a prison sentence. Some defendants donate to Russia’s Ukraine war effort in the hope that it will be treated as a mitigating factor—but this is no guarantee of freedom. Yekaterinin, who was sent to prison, had transferred more than 10,000 roubles (around $130) to the “People’s Front. All for Victory” fund. The same goes for renouncing one’s previous views. Yekaterinin pleaded guilty, and his lawyer argued in court that the ACF had “set him up” by “playing on” citizens’ patriotic sentiments.

A lawyer who handles ACF donor cases told Mediazona that, in his experience, sentencing is shaped by a host of factors, including “the personal impression the defendant and the defence make on a particular judge”.

Outside Moscow, custodial sentences have become more common in Kaliningrad Region, though punishments there remain lighter than in the capital. In October 2025, defendants named Feshchenkov and Kovalenko were each sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. In December, a local resident named Kazanovsky received four months. In February 2026, another Kaliningrad resident was sentenced to three years. In total, at least five people in the region have been given custodial sentences, including Pavel Natsarenus, who was jailed for eight months in 2024.

Besides Moscow and Kaliningrad Region, custodial sentences for ACF donations have also recently been handed down in Kirov Region and Stavropol [Territory]. In November, a court in Kirov sentenced an IT entrepreneur, who had left Russia back in September 2022, to three years in absentia. Konstantin Bernatov, a resident of Stavropol, received the same sentence in January, this time in person. The details of his case are not known.

The folklorist Valery Ledkov from Khanty-Mansiysk, whom we mentioned in our previous update, has since been released. In February, the Seventh Court of Cassation commuted his custodial sentence to a suspended one.

We deal separately with cases in which the defendant is charged with something else in addition to ACF donations—an additional charge can substantially affect the sentence. Lawyers warn that once the security services have taken an interest in someone because of their support for the foundation, they may well find other grounds for prosecution.

Igor Meshalnikov, a resident of Kostroma Region, was first fined 40,000 roubles (around $530) for donating to the ACF and then, several months later, detained on a fresh charge of financing Artpodgotovka. He was ultimately sentenced to 10 years.

Alexander Germizin, secretary of the Vladimir branch of the liberal opposition party Rassvet, was first convicted of “[condoning] terrorism”. A second case was then opened against him over cryptocurrency transfers to the ACF and the Armed Forces of Ukraine made after the start of the war (“financing extremism” and “treason”). The security services had likely gained access to Germizin’s devices during the first case and found the prohibited payments there. He was sentenced to 15 years.

A similar sentence—14 years—was imposed on a resident of [the Maritime Territory] in the Far East who had made transfers to the ACF and the AFU “totalling more than 13,000 roubles” (around $170). Exactly how he moved the money is unclear.

There are also the opposite cases, in which someone is first detained on charges unrelated to supporting the opposition. This is what happened to Viktor Mezhuiev from Sakhalin Region. In 2025 he and his friends were first convicted of illegal fishing, and a few months later he was sentenced on charges of “financing extremism”. He was fined 300,000 roubles (around $4,000).

The Moscow City Court designated the ACF an extremist organisation in June 2021; the ruling came into force on August 4. The next day, the foundation launched a new donation drive through the American payments service Stripe.

The ACF’s team believed that because Stripe would not cooperate with the Russian security services, investigators would be unable to identify its donors. But on the very first day of the new drive, a critical error occurred: the payment description that appeared on some donors’ bank statements contained part of the foundation’s website address: WORLD.FBK.IN (ACF’s Russian-language abbreviation is FBK).

The first criminal cases were opened in August 2022. While analysing bank statements, security forces noticed other matching identifiers in the ACF transfers, specifically the merchant ID. This significantly expanded the pool of suspects, and merchant IDs and other technical identifiers have now become the primary evidence in donation cases.

In early August 2025, Mediazona published a detailed study on how criminal cases against donors are structured; at the time, 76 cases were known. The study concluded with instructions on how to check if you are at risk and what to do if you sent money to the ACF via Stripe.

The ACF issued a statement emphasizing that Vladimir Putin bears responsibility for the repressions and that the evidence in such cases is inconsistent. The foundation added that it had warned “a significant number of potential defendants in criminal cases” of the danger, and “several people were successfully evacuated.”

In early September, the ACF’s director, Ivan Zhdanov, announced that he was stepping down from the foundation. In an interview after his departure, he described the decision to launch a donation drive after the organisation’s ban as “ill-advised”.

“Risky decisions were taken, which Putin’s regime ultimately exploited,” he said.

Source: Olga Romashova, “The 225 donor cases. Russian authorities continue to prosecute donors to Navalny’s Anti‑Corruption Foundation across the country,” Mediazona, 21 April 2026. The emphasis is mine. I have also made a few tiny emendations to bring the text into line with common English-language editing standards. ||||| trr

Jeffrey Epstein’s Petersburg Connections

In documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of sexually trafficking minors, the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University [aka Smolny College] is mentioned about thirty times.

Bumaga has examined some of the so-called Epstein files. Read how the American was invited to the graduation ceremony at Smolny and how the financier himself recommended the Petersburg university to fashion models.

How Epstein was invited to a graduation ceremony at St. Petersburg State University

In May 2013, Alexei Kudrin, then dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, sent an invitation to Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, to attend the graduation ceremony. Botstein, in turn, invited Jeffrey Epstein to accompany him to Petersburg. Faculty co-founder Valery Monakhov also emailed an invitation to the American financier to visit St. Petersburg State University.

The program included an official ceremony in St. Petersburg State University’s auditorium on University Embankment and a ball at the Bobrinsky Palace [the home of Smolny College]. During the graduation ceremony, Leon Botstein planned to introduce Epstein to Kudrin, who was not only the head of the faculty but also a former Russian finance minister. The financier himself had already been convicted of trafficking minors.

Epstein never went to St. Petersburg State University, however: his assistant, Lesley Groff, responded to the invitations by saying that her boss was busy.

How Epstein partly financed Bard College

Bard College is a private tertiary educational institution in the United States that collaborated with St. Petersburg State University for over twenty years. The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences was established with its involvement. The collaboration continued until 2021, when Bard College was declared an “undesirable organization” in Russia. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office declared that the work of the university “poses a threat to the foundations of the constitutional order and security.” Russian academics and artists decried the sanctions against the college as yet another blow to research and education in Russia.

In 2023, Wall Street Journal reporters revealed that, in 2016, Epstein had donated $150,000 to Bard College President Leon Botstein and transferred $270,000 for Professor Noam Chomsky. Epstein had previously donated funds to the college on several occasions, including $75,000 in 2011.

According to media reports, Bard College scholars met with Epstein on several occasions after the financier was charged with soliciting prostitution from minors in 2008.

Meanwhile, according to journalists, Botstein sat on the advisory board of Epstein’s foundation. The president of Bard College, however, has claimed that he did not perform any work for the foundation. 

How Epstein advised young female models to apply to Smolny

The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences—Smolny College—appears several times in Epstein’s correspondence with women who mention that they work in the modeling business. We do not know whether Epstein was corresponding with one young woman or several. The names of potential victims have been redacted in most of the files.

In 2018, Epstein met with the “President of Smolny” (whether this was Alexei Kudrin or officials at Bard College is not known) to discuss the process of applying to St. Petersburg State University and subsequently transferring to Bard College.

Epstein then counseled his female acquaintance as follows:

“first year smolny but the credits are us credits transferable to any us school,” he writes.

“I’m afraid to leave USA now,” she replies.

“I understand however the transfer program is great,” he writes.

Epstein also sent links to Smolny’s programs to a model in 2019. He had invited his correspondent to visit him in Paris, while the young woman suggested they sleep together that night. “you can visit for 30 minutes. I want to know more about university desire , I will let you go early to get some sleep,” Epstein replied.

In 2018, a young Russian woman named Anna is mentioned in Epstein’s online correspondence. The financier tried to connect her with his acquaintances from Bard College so that they could “help her make a decision about Smolny.” Epstein’s assistants booked tickets for the young woman to Paris, Tel Aviv, and the United States.

Bumaga noticed that the information about Anna as contained in the correspondence coincides with the biographical details of a model from Petersburg. Judging by the young woman’s age, she was not a minor at the time of her interactions with Epstein. In 2017–2019, photos taken in France and Israel appeared on her social media pages. Her name was not subsequently mentioned on the websites of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences or Bard College.

Anna had not responded to our message by the time this article was published.

Who was Epstein and how else is Petersburg mentioned in his case files?

Jeffrey Epstein was a former mathematics teacher and billionaire who had close ties to the world’s political, business, and academic elites. Epstein was the central figure in one of the most high-profile criminal cases of the twenty-first century after he was charged with sexually exploiting and trafficking minors. The American was first convicted in 2008 under a lenient plea bargain deal with prosecutors, but he was re-arrested on federal charges in 2019. Epstein died in prison shortly after his arrest. His death was ruled a suicide, but the official account is still a matter of controversy in the U.S.

The documents published by the U.S. authorities on the Epstein case contain mentions of world leader and other influential figures, including U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk. However, the fact that individuals are mentioned in the files does not imply that there are grounds for charges against them.

Petersburg is mentioned over a thousand times in the released files. Earlier, Bumaga reported that, between 2014 and 2016, Epstein corresponded and met with Sergei Belyakov, former Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Chairman of the Board of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

In July 2015, at Epstein’s request, Belyakov made inquiries into a certain young woman from Moscow who was allegedly attempting to blackmail businessmen in New York. Belyakov set about his search for information without asking any questions and, a couple of days later, replied that the Russian woman in question was working as an escort and, during the peak season from May to August, earned more than $100,000.

According to the Dossier Center, the woman in question was a model named Guzel [Ganieva] who in March 2021 accused American billionaire Leon Black of coercing her into performing sadistic sexual acts. Guzel claimed that Black had introduced her to Epstein and tried to force her to have sex with “his best friend,” but the Russian woman refused.

Epstein also assisted Belyakov with organizing SPIEF 2015 and the Open Innovations Forum. The American financier did not attend the economic forum himself, but he introduced [link not functioning currently] Belyakov to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who ended up appearing SPIEF 2015.

Epstein also suggested “dream attendes” for the forums to Belyakov and promised to provide contact information for former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The meeting with the latter took place only in 2016.

In April 2018, Belyakov also planned to send a letter to the Russian consulate in New York requesting that Epstein be granted a three-year visa to Russia.

Belyakov is currently the president of the Association of Nongovernmental Pension Funds. He declined our request for a comment.

Source: “Epstein and the Faculty of Liberal Arts: how a financier accused of sex trafficking and sexual abuse of minors is linked to Smolny,” Bumaga, 3 February 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

Wajahat Ali, “EXPOSED: Epstein & the Far‑Right Plot to Undermine DEMOCRACY”

What if Jeffrey Epstein’s influence wasn’t just about sex trafficking scandals but part of a broader far‑right agenda to destabilize democratic institutions worldwide? In this explosive video, we break down the latest revelations from the Epstein Files and explore how his network may have intersected with powerful right‑wing actors, online extremists, and political operatives. Investigative journalist Ryan Broderick joins us to unpack the latest revelations from the Epstein Files, revealing how his network intersected with powerful political actors, extremists, and online operators.

Source: Wajahat Ali (YouTube), 4 February 2026

Timur Kacharava’s Murder by Neo-Nazis Remembered Twenty Years On

Flowers laid at the site where the antifascist Timur Kacharava was murdered: a photoreportage by Bumaga

Twenty years ago, neo-Nazis assaulted Timur and his friend Maxim Zgibay outside the Bukvoyed bookstore on Vosstaniya Square. Today [13 November 2025] a spontaneous memorial arose there once more.

The murder: On 13 November 2005, Kacharava received six stab wounds to the neck and died on the spot. Zgibay was hospitalized in critical condition. Alexei Shabalin, found guilty of Timur’s murder, was sentenced to twelve years in a penal colony. Four of the assailants were sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from two to twelve years, while the other three were given suspended sentences.

The plaque: Nearly every year, the inscription “TIMUR, WE WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER YOU” appears on the wall of the building next to the murder site. Today, Yabloko party chair Nikolai Rybakov sent an appeal to [St. Petersburg] Governor Alexander Beglov, urging him to install a permanent memorial plaque marking the spot of Kacharava’s violent death.

The film: Leftist organization RevKomsomol – RKSM(b) has released the trailer of an upcoming film with the working title Antifascists by Calling. The film is being produced with the support of the creative association RevKino, RKP(i), and the nonprofit initiative Food Not Bombs.

Source: Bumaga (Facebook), 13 November 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Yulia Moskovskaya, Terrorist

Twenty-two-year-old Yulia Moskovskaya (née Joban) was detained in Petersburg in mid-June. She is suspected of attempting to carry out a terrorist attack against a drone design company employee. She failed to plant an explosive device [sic], according to the press service of the Petersburg municipal courts.

Moskovskaya was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention center. Investigators say that she “espouses a pro-Ukrainian ideology and is hostile to the current Russian government,” and claim that the young woman tried to “impact decision-making” by means of a terrorist attack. Criminal terrorist cases are opened every month, but usually they do not involve harm to specific people. In 2024, seventy-five people, including ten women, were convicted in Russia for carrying out terrorist attacks.

Bumaga has learned that Moskovskaya is not speaking with her family, and that a female friend of her has become her spokesperson. We chatted with this young woman about how the suspect behaved before her arrest, how she got into debt, and when she moved to Petersburg.

The detainee’s family: “Yulia changed her surname: she didn’t want anything to remind her of her kin”

Yulia and I are quite close friends. Her lawyer informed me of her arrest. I was shocked when he contacted me. At first I thought it was some kind of prank. I still can’t believe it has really happened.

I have known Yulia since 2017. We are from different cities and met online in a fan group for our favorite singer. At first, we were pen pals, but then we took our relationship offline and saw each other in person many times.

Yulia wasn’t in touch with many people, so she must have given the lawyer my contact info. She didn’t have many friends. Yulia didn’t speak with her relatives. She has a mother and a younger brother [who live in Moscow], as well as her grandparents, who live in some other city.

Yulia has always had bad relations with her mother. Her mother had a live-in boyfriend who always treated Yulia badly and beat her. Her mother took the boyfriend’s side and didn’t stand up for her daughter.

Yulia Moskovskaya. Source: social media

Yulia’s father died in 2020, and Yulia didn’t have a close relationship with him either. He drank heavily. He regularly brought his drinking buddies home and would get so drunk that he couldn’t stand up. Yulia often escaped to the neighbors when her father, out of his mind, tried to beat her. When we talked on the phone, I could hear her father getting into a fighting mood; he would be saying something to Yulia, and she would scream and run off. The neighbors would even call the police, but they could calm him down only for a while, and only once did take him to the slammer. Yulia essentially had no one to whom she could turn. In difficult situations, she would call the mental health hotline.

As an adult, Yulia changed her surname [from Joban to Moskovskaya]: according to her, she didn’t want anything to remind her of her kin. She sought treatment from psychologists. In the beginning, she had hope that they would help her, but then she just went to them to get things off her chest.

Debts and the move from Moscow to Petersburg: “Creative work was her only stable hobby”

Three times, Yulia enrolled in different [institutions of higher learning]. But she wouldn’t like something about them and would drop out. For a while, she was studying to be a designer. I don’t remember what her other two majors were.

A few years ago, Yulia moved for the first time from Moscow to Petersburg: she had always liked the city. You could say that she flitted between the two capitals.

Yulia originally had her own place to live. After his death, her father left his children an inheritance. Yulia and her brother sold her father’s flat in Moscow and split the money, so she was able to buy her own place in Petersburg. She lived there for a few months, but got bored and bought a flat in another neighborhood. After a while, she went back [to Moscow], buying a flat in the Moscow Region. Soon afterwards she sold her last home and went back to Petersburg, where she lived in a rented flat.

Yulia often changed jobs. The first place she worked was McDonald’s, before it left Russia. She stayed at that job for several years. After that she worked as a courier, then as a consultant in a store. Almost every month she would change jobs if she wasn’t satisfied with something. She didn’t regard any of her jobs as permanent. She said that she would soon leave [Russia] and that she only needed temporary, part-time work.

Yulia Moskovskaya. Source: social media

I know that Yulia had outstanding loans and that she didn’t have enough money to live on. She said that she had been sued by debt collectors. (In May 2025, a Moscow court ruled in favor of debt collectors trying to recover debts from Moskovskaya under a loan agreement — Bumaga.) She had spent the money on surgery [not covered under free public healthcare], and on braces.

Yeah, she’s not a very steady person. She gets bored with things quickly. Creative work was her only stable hobby. (On social media, Moskovskaya followed a lot of literature and Silver Age poetry groups — Bumaga.) She drew and wrote poems. Recently, she had been making her own jewelry and trying to sell it.

Moskovskaya’s views and her abandoned cat: “Before her arrest, she said she wanted to go to the war”

When the war broke out, Yulia immediately supported Ukraine. She said that she didn’t like the regime in Russia. She had a very firm stance. But I wouldn’t say she was always interested in politics. Before the war, I hadn’t noticed that she followed the news. I was surprised when she suddenly became politicized. Moreover, she has no Ukrainian relatives.

Before her arrest — since last summer — she had been saying that she wanted to go to the war. She mentioned that she had visited military enlistment offices and contacted people who could help her get to Ukraine, but everyone, according to her, had turned her down. I tried to warn her about the consequences: what if she died or something? She replied that she didn’t care, that this was her purpose in life and that such a death would be an act of heroism.

All last month, she kept saying that she would be leaving Petersburg for Ukraine and that some people would help her do this.

When Yulia was detained, I was allowed to speak with her for literally several seconds. The only thing she said was that I should go get her cat, which had been temporarily placed in a shelter.

Yulia Moskovskaya’s cat. Source: social media

I had imagined that Yulia would be hysterical, panicked. According to her lawyer, however, she is surprisingly calm.

Source: “‘She attempted to plant explosives under a car’: friend of 22-year-old Yulia, accused of plotting a terrorist attack, speaks of her loneliness and debt,” Bumaga, 30 June 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Antifascist Timur Kacharava’s Mother Remembers Her Son 19 Years After His Murder by Neo-Nazis

It is a tradition in Petersburg to visit the improvised memorial to Timur Kacharava outside the Bukvoyed bookstore on Vosstaniya Street every year on the evening of November 13. Candles and portraits of the antifascist, who was murdered at this spot nineteen years ago, are brought there by his mother and a changing roster of first-time visitors. Last year the memorial was torn down by far-right activists.

Eight people were convicted of the knife attack on the twenty-year-old Timur and his friend Maxim Zgibay (who was wounded but survived the assault), and five of them were sentenced to prison. All of them have been released (the killer was paroled in 2016) and disappeared from the limelight.

Bumaga asked Irina Kacharava about the people she has seen at the memorials over the past nineteen years, how she feels about the release of Timur and Maxim’s assailants, and what life choices her son would have made in today’s Russia.

— How do you usually spend November thirteenth?

— The day before, I always wish it wasn’t happening. I wish it was the twelfth or the fourteenth. I wish I could just forget it, erase it, and be done with it. But I cannot. The thirteenth comes. I spend it at work or at home. Between five and six-thirty my husband and I go to the wall [at the Bukvoyed bookstore] on Vosstaniya Square. We go to the cemetery the day before, of course. We make sure to leave Timur’s favorite flowers, irises, [at his grave].

We hate this day, and we don’t want it to happen. For some reason it’s easy to go to the cemetery, but it’s very hard to go to the wall. But we gave our word that as long as we are alive, as long as we are able, we will go, no matter how hard it is.

We are always surprised that we are not the only ones there. Each year we think that this time round no one will come for sure. People come, and I’m surprised that all of them are young people. I ask them how they even heard about Timur, since they weren’t even alive when it happened. Nineteen years have passed. They say they heard [about Timur] from their moms and dads, and some from their brothers and sisters. That’s surprising.

We dislike this day very much, but we go to the wall, and then we try to start living again.

— Do you meet Timur’s friends? Do you communicate with them on other days?

— For a long time, ten years at least, we kept in very close contact with all of Timur’s friends. We would even get together. That has been winding down now, but it’s normal, I think. So many years have passed, and some have families, while others have left the country.

Mostly strangers or people who have been going for years come to the wall — for example, adults [sic] from the former Memorial.

— Over the years, it has been suggested that a memorial plaque be erected or a street be named in Timur’s honor. Do you think it is still possible?

— MP Nikolai Rybakov (who is the national leader of the Yabloko Party but not an MP — Bumaga) launched the campaign to put up a plaque. He personally approached us at the wall: he said he had made a request to the authorities, and that he was waiting for response. Time has passed, but nothing has happened.

— Would you like it to happen?

— I don’t know: I never thought about it. I don’t believe anyone will ever do it. And I don’t think it could happen at all given the current situation [in Russia].

By the way, there were fewer lads of conscription age [at the yearly memorial] when all these sad events [the war] began. At the beginning of the [military] mobilization, they were afraid to come. Law enforcement agencies are always present there to prevent mayhem.

— How did you react when one of the people involved in the attack, Alexander Zenin, who had been in hiding for twelve years, was detained in 2018?

— I laughed. He had been living in Pesochny the whole time. During that time he had managed to have two children, but the police had been unable to catch him. The trial was hard for me; my husband went to it. The police investigator called us and told us that the case would start to kick off again, that we would have to go to the court hearings again. He said that if we signed a paper that the case could proceed without our presence, then it would be wrapped up in one hearing. So we signed it. It turned out that he just wanted to tick a box and close the case quickly, and so there was no investigation as such. But it didn’t matter by and large. Whether he was caught or not, I wish him well and hope that his children grow up, for God’s sake.

— In 2007, you said about the attackers: “I have no vengeful feelings.” You haven’t had any since then?

— No, it’s not rational to seek revenge.

— Did they try to contact you, to apologize?

— What apologies could there be after I attended the court hearings?! I was alone there without my husband, and our lawyer was away at the time. I was alone against the seven defendants, their parents, and their lawyers. Twenty-one people tried to bite me (figuratively speaking), cut me, and kill me. I had started going to the court hearings to defend Timur. The parents of the defendants felt so angry with me that Timur had crossed their paths and caused their children to suffer.

Zenin sent us fifty thousand rubles in 201. He was apologizing, as it were, so that he would get a big plus [in his character testimony] in court. But I didn’t take the money. I asked the investigator how I could inform the court that I had not taken the money. He told me: “It was the good will of the defendant — he sent the money. Nobody cares whether you took it or not.” (Alexander Zenin was sentenced in 2018 to one and a half years in a medium security penal colony for inciting hatred and enmity.)

— You are employed as a teacher. Do you observe political activism among young children? Have their views been radicalized? Or are their attitudes apolitical?

— I’ll talk about their parents, because everything comes from the family. The parents are completely susceptible to propaganda. Of course, there are children who voice their opinions, but I do not get into these conversations with them due to professional ethics.

There are children who repeat what the TV says, what their parents say. Although there were some pupils whose parents were of the same opinion as me, and, accordingly, their children also think differently. I didn’t discuss things with them, but I was pleased to hear that not everyone was marching in lockstep. Although young people are chewed out, they are decent folk; there are all kinds of different people [among them], just like we were, just like you are. There are always pros and cons. It’s just that now the propaganda is so heavy that it is difficult to analyze the situation and have an opinion.

I can tell you this about the younger children. Whereas before [the war] they played cops and robbers, and no one wanted to be a cop, and everyone wanted to be a robber, now they play terrorists. And for some reason both sides are terrorists.

— What would Timur be doing in Russia in 2024?

— I think he would have left by 2022. He would have gone to Europe: he had his own people there. I would not say that he would have left for political reasons. The most important thing for him was music. He expressed his views through music. That’s where he would have gone. The politics would have been secondary.

— Is life in Russia more dangerous now than it was in 2005?

— Of course. There is no comparison. Despite what happened to our family in 2005, it’s not even up for discussion.

— Would you have been happy if he had left the country, but was safe and doing creative things?

— When children leave home or leave the country, it’s always sad, I guess. I’ve been trying to fool myself all these years (as psychologists have counseled me to do) that he’s alive but has just left the country. But it doesn’t work for me.

Would I have welcomed his leaving? I think it would have been his choice. His father and I would have had to accept that choice. It wouldn’t have mattered much whether we liked it or didn’t like it, whether we were sad or not. And who’s to say he would have been safe there? We don’t know what he would have done there. We would just have had to accept his choices, like we accepted his life choices in 2005.

I was reproached at the trial for not forbidding him from doing all those things. Doing what? Rescuing animals from the streets and feeding homeless people? (Timur Kacharava was a vegan and fed homeless people at Food Not Bombs events — Bumaga.) What were we supposed to forbid him from doing do? I just didn’t realize at the time that it would prove to be so dangerous. We would have just accepted his choice, because he would have had the right to it, as well as the right to make it a reality.

So, it is better that he lived a short, tragic life that was his own life rather than than the long, boring life which we would have dreamt up for him. Of course I would have been sad [had he left]. How could I not have been sad?

Source: “‘It is better that he lived a short, tragic life that was his own life’: The mother of anti-fascist Timur Kacharava, murdered in 2005, on who in St. Petersburg continues to remember her son,” Bumaga, 14 November 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. As I was preparing this post, a friend of mine in Petersburg wrote me the following:

“Last night, I stood for a while next to the memorial to Timur outside the Bukvoyed store on Vosstaniya. Suddenly three antifa showed up, one of them sporting a mohawk. They told me that a bonehead [a neo-Nazi skinhead] had just shot at them with a trauma pistol. He had been going to attack one of the antifa, but when he noticed that there were three of them he ran away and fired a parting shot. That’s what they said. E. saw young boneheads at Avtovo that evening. Considering that they now often attack couriers and janitors [i.e., Central Asian migrant workers] in particular, there is partly the same disturbing feeling as before [i.e., during the intense wave of neo-Nazi attacks on ethnic minorities, immigrants, and antifascists in Petersburg in the late 2000s]. That’s on top of everything else.”

Severe Employee Shortages on the Homefront and Staggering Casualties on the Battlefield

How much have Petersburgers’ wages grown over the past year? How do companies and experts explain the shortage of personnel? How will the tightening of migration laws affect employers? Bumaga looked at the numbers and talked to online recruiters hh.ru to give you a picture of the main trends in St. Petersburg’s labor market in 2024.

Bike couriers emerging from a pedestrian underpass in downtown St. Petersburg. Photo: Nikolai Vinokurov/Lori via Bumaga

Petersburgers’ salaries grew by over thirteen percent during the year according to both official stats and hh.ru’s data

Analysts at hh.ru told Bumaga that the average monthly salary advertised to Petersburgers in early October 2024 had increased by nineteen percent compared to last year’s figures — up to 79,300 rubles a month [approx. 750 euros]. Petrostat cites similar dynamics, although it cites different overall numbers. According to the city’s statistical agency, the average monthly salary in St. Petersburg increased by 13.1% in August 2024 compared to last August, amounting to 99,800 rubles.

petrostat-average salaries august 2024Download

Top managers enjoyed the biggest increase in their average pay — 20,600 rubles a month — Maria Buzunova, head of hh.ru’s press service for the Northwest Federal District and the Central Federal District, told Bumaga. Consulting and strategy professionals, whose average income increased by 20,000 rubles [approx. 190 euros], came in second place.

“Wages in agriculture, insurance, raw materials extraction, the auto business, and auto repair have also been on the rise. Amid the unfolding personnel deficit, employers are still trying to catch applicants in construction and laborers with the money hook. That said, there is not a single sector where advertised salaries have fallen,” Buzunova says.

According Buzunova, average salaries in agriculture, investment and consulting, the auto business, raw materials extraction, and management have exceeded the 100,000 ruble per month mark. Analysts at hh.ru recorded average monthly salaries of round 100,000 rubles in the information technology, transportation, construction, and real estate fields.

Petrostat’s numbers would lead us to believe that the growth of salaries in the city has already stopped. According to the department’s data, the average monthly salary of Petersburgers was higher in the period from April to June than it is now, amounting to approximately 103,500 rubles [approx. 985]. Data from hh.ru suggest the opposite. The online recruiters told Bumaga in mid April that they had estimated the average advertised salary at 72,500 rubles per month. Thus, in five and a half months, this indicator has increased by 9.4%.

petrostat-wages in SPb & LO, january to june 2024Download

Employers are facing a shortage of employees. Demand for teachers and medics has grown in the city

The experts at hh.ru argue that the main reason for wage growth has been the stable growth of demand for staff on the part of employers. The total number of vacancies in St. Petersburg reached 750,000 from January to early October, which is eighteen percent higher than for the same period in 2023.

“Consequently, the problem of staffing shortages has been deepening. This is confirmed by our survey of employers, which we started a couple of years ago. According to the majority of company reps both in Russia as a whole and in St. Petersburg, staffing shortages remain the fundamental problem of the labor market,” the online recruiters told Bumaga.

Demand for teachers and tutors (up twenty-six percent compared to last year), sales clerks and other retail workers (up twenty-five percent compared to last year), and medical personnel (up twenty-three percent compared to last year) has risen the most in St. Petersburg. One of the reasons for the shortage of teachers and medics is their declining interest in staying in their professions and their leaving for other sectors with better working conditions, hh.ru noted.

However, entrepreneurs from other sectors — for example, owners of restaurants, bars and cafes — have also spoken out about staffing shortages. “There is a shortage of absolutely everyone, both waiters and managers,” Vitaliya Dolinskaya, operations director at the restaurants Chang and Che-Dor, told Bumaga.

According to the heads of the companies surveyed by hh.ru, one of the reasons for the shortage of personnel is the demographic situation in the country. Other factors that negatively impact the labor market are the lack of qualified personnel, the low labor mobility of Russians, and insufficient inflows of foreign migrant workers.

Stricter migration laws may aggravate shortages of sales clerks, drivers and couriers. Companies’ costs will be borne by consumers of their goods and services

The shortage of migrant workers can be explained, among other things, by the actions of the Russian authorities after the terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall music venue outside of Moscow. The State Duma continues to tighten migration laws, foreign nationals have been increasingly deported from the country, quotas for temporary work-and-residence permits have been reduced, and the police regularly carry out “anti-migrant” raids.

The attitudes of Russians towards labor migrants have also changed. Eighty percent of Petersburgers surveyed by hh.ru believe that there are too many migrants in the city. At the same time, only thirty-six percent of respondents would agree to take “migrant” jobs. Most often this opinion was voiced by workers in the restaurant and hotel business, logistics and transportation, sales, construction, and the retail trade.

Yulia Sakharova, hh.ru’s director for the Northwest Federal District, claims that the upshot of all this is a shortage of people to fill the most high-demand vacancies — for sales clerks, drivers, and couriers.

“The tightening of migration policy may complicate recruitment for companies. In most cases, the depletion of an already scarce resource leads to an increase in its cost. Employers will have higher recruitment costs. They will be forced to compete against each other by raising wages, and further shift the increased costs onto the price of their services, a price that will be paid by the end consumer,” Sakharova explained to Bumaga.

Factories are looking for young skilled workers, and IT salaries have stabilized. A few more trends in the labor market

Here are five more trends in the Petersburg labor market:

  • St. Petersburg has become less attractive for employment. In the fourth quarter of 2024, the city dropped from fourteenth to twenty-sixth place in hh.ru’s ratings. This happened due to increased competition and an increase in the number of Petersburgers willing to move to other regions. “This does not mean that the city has become a worse place to work. It means that labor conditions have not improved so dynamically in St. Petersburg compared to other regions,” Maria Buzunova.
  • Petersburg enterprises have been forty-nine percent more likely to offer jobs to young skilled workers than in 2023. Since the beginning of the year, the city’s factories and other production facilities have posted more than 14,000 vacancies which are open to recent graduates and personnel without work experience.
  • There were about one thousand vacancies for cab drivers in St. Petersburg in August 2024, which was fifty percent more than a year earlier. And yet, there are fewer applicants: on average, one or two people apply for each vacancy (the lower limit is four people per vacancy), hh.ru noted. This circumstance also affects the price of cab rides, which we examined in more detail here.
  • In 2023, the salaries of IT workers in St. Petersburg decreased for the first time in several years. In 2024, incomes in the IT sector increased again, according to hh.ru. For example, the salaries of developers have grown by seven percent, while those of analysts have risen by fifteen percent. “However, we have also seen a transition from a jobseeker’s market to an employer’s market. According to our research, the overheated market for IT professionals has reached its limit and will gradually stabilize as more and more companies refuse to give employees dynamic salary increases,” hh.ru explained.
  • Petersburgers are more and more often quitting stressful jobs that negatively affect their emotional state. Given these conditions, employers are forced to introduce practices for handling their employees with care and patience, hh.ru noted.

Source: “Companies compete by raising wages as Petersburg’s personnel shortage grows. Which sectors have the fewest skilled workers,” Bumaga, 4 November 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Russian casualties in Vladimir Putin‘s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have surpassed 700,000, according to Kyiv, which trolled Moscow over the round number of such a grim milestone.

In its daily update, Ukraine’s military said on Monday that over the previous day, Russian forces had suffered 1,300 personnel losses, taking the total number since the start of the full-scale invasion to 700,390.

“‘Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.’ Rene Descartes,” Ukraine’s defense ministry posted on X referring to the French philosopher.

Newsweek has contacted the Russian defense ministry for comment. An accurate number of casualties, which Ukraine says are “approximate” and include those who are both dead or injured, is difficult to ascertain, with both sides remaining tightlipped over their losses.

Russia has not updated its figures since September 2022 when it said that just under 6,000 had been killed, while Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that 31,000 Ukrainian troops had died, although this was lower than Western estimates.

U.S. officials told The New York Times that September was the bloodiest month of the war since its start in February 2022 and that more than 600,000 were dead and wounded, with the spike caused by assaults in the east of Ukraine where Putin’s forces have made slow gains but at a great cost in personnel.

An unnamed U.S. official cited by The New York Times said that more than 57,500 Ukrainian troops had been killed and 250,000 wounded.

Estonian intelligence estimated that Russia may have lost around 40,000 soldiers in October alone, a figure backed up by other estimates and higher than the 30,000 new soldiers that Ukrainian military intelligence believes are being recruited per month.

In its update in mid-October, independent Russian news outlet Mediazona said that 75,382 killed Russian troops had been identified, an increase of 2,483 since the start of the month.

Source: Brendan Cole, “Russia Hits Grim Troop Loss Milestone,” Newsweek, 4 November 2024

Hideout

It took me a while to understand why the news about the prisoner swap has been making me feel bitter rather than happy, although I wish all these people freedom, of course.

No, it wasn’t because, thanks to an American journalist’s arrogance and a German tourist’s stupidity, a professional FSB killer has been set free, meaning that his crime will go unpunished and nullifying the enormous efforts a large number of people made in apprehending him. And not because they mainly swapped for prisoners celebrated by the media, leaving in the gulag the unknown loners who wanted to fight on behalf of Ukraine. And not even because the leaders of the Anti-Corruption Foundation themselves took credit for the release of Navalny’s supporters while failing to thank the US authorities for their unbelievable efforts in haggling for their people’s freedom.

My bitterness arises from the very fact that the haggling took place. It shows that Putin is treated as a force to be reckoned with, that he is given what he wants. And that means that Putin’s Russia will be around for a long time to come. The regime is recognized and there is still no strategic decision on what to do about it.

Source: Julia Khazagaeva (Facebook), 1 August 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

In 2024, the creators of the Wynwood Hotel opened Hideout, a new public space [sic] at 22 Rimsky-Korsakov Avenue [in Petersburg]. Bumaga shows its readers what the neighborhood looks like and explains how it is laid out.

“You’re easy to love.” Photo: @3axapkina (Instagram)

People started talking about the space in the spring of 2024, when a banner emblazoned with the words “You’re easy to love” was hung on the facade of a historic building. This Is a Sign, a team that installs similar messages in the urban environment, was commissioned by Hideout to do the piece.

The Hideout Residence apartments began operating in the summer, and a Scandinavian garden in the courtyard was also opened, Hideout told Bumaga.

The garden in the courtyard was designed by landscape architecture studio L.Buro. The main works have been completed, but the garden will be developed and improved in the future, Hideout said.



L.Buro’s new Scandinavian garden project is now open to the public! Hideout is an urban space featuring an aparthotel, restaurants, and a fitness studio. Spoiler: a hotel and a contemporary art gallery will open there soon🤫 When designing this project, the studio’s architects managed to take a fresh look at Petersburg’s historic centre . In the video, L.Buro founders Valery Fedotov and Pyotr Lari talk in detail about the Hideout project.

The space’s press service of the space also noted that trees and plants were already growing at the site in the late eighteenth century. State Councillor Charles Gascoine, who owned the plot, laid out a fruit orchard near his mansion.

L.Buro’s rendering of Hideout’s garden

Suite Beauty Salon, Power Peach Yoga and Functional Training Studio, and other tenants operate in the space. The space’s first gastronomic tenant was Jam Café, by the creators of Atelier Tapas & Bar, which opened at the beginning of the year.

In the summer, Hideout added another gastro project, Aster Bakery‘s 23-table patio terrace in the courtyard.

Aster Bakery’s patio terrace. Photo: Hideout

An aparthotel featuring 60- to 100-square-metre residences has been welcoming guests. They have been decorated in neutral colors and sport designer furniture.

In August, the residences can be booked starting at 43,000 rubles [approx. 500 USD] a night.

A residence at Hideout

Source: “Hideout is a space in Kolomna with a Scandinavian garden, an Aster Bakery patio, and a sign that says, ‘You’re easy to love.’ Here’s what it looks like,” Bumaga, 31 July 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

This Russian Life: Alexandra Karaseva’s Election Day Molotov Cocktail

Alexandra Karaseva. Photo from social media account via Bumaga

During the three days of the [presidential] election in Russia, the Interior Ministry reports, twenty-one criminal cases were launched over attempts to set fires at polling stations or spoil ballots with brilliant green dye solution. Twenty-one-year-old student Alexandra Karaseva was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention centre after being arraigned on just such charges.

According to police investigators, on 15 March, Karaseva threw a Molotov cocktail at a polling station poster on the porch of School No. 358. No one was injured.

Bumaga explored what we know about Alexandra Karaseva, why she might have committed the arson attack, and what defendants charged with obstructing the work of polling places face.

In St. Petersburg, 21-year-old Alexandra Karaseva was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention centre. Investigators allege that she threw a Molotov cocktail at a polling station

Around three p.m. on the first day of voting, 15 March, a young woman ran up to the porch of School No. 358, in Petersburg’s Moscow District, and threw a Molotov cocktail at the wall, as seen in surveillance footage.

The school housed two election precincts—No. 1395 and No. 1396. The attempted arson only left traces of soot on the upper part of the information sign bearing the elections logo and on the wall of the school. No one was injured and the operation of the polling station was unaffected.

The aftermath of the 15 March arson attempt on the porch of School No. 358 in Petersburg. Photo courtesy of Bumaga

The young woman tried to run away but was immediately detained by one of the witnesses. After the incident, the media and the municipal courts press service revealed the suspect’s identity: 21-year-old Alexandra Karaseva. According to the media, the young woman told the police that she had been promised payment for the arson, and that she had received the assignment from a certain “Ukrainian Telegram channel.”

Karaseva was charged with “obstructing the exercise of voting rights” and faces up to five years in prison if convicted. According to police investigators, unidentified persons had inveigled Karaseva “into a criminal plan” over the telephone. The arson attack’s goal was to disrupt the work of polling stations, the investigators claim.

The next day, 16 March, Petersburg’s Moscow District Court remanded Karaseva in custody to a pretrial detention centre. The young woman had pleaded guilty, but asked to be placed under house arrest.

She danced, wasn’t interested in politics, and had financial troubles: how Alexandra Karaseva is described by her acquaintances

Karaseva moved to Petersburg from the Amur Region about four years ago, according to her social media accounts. In 2020, she graduated from school in Blagoveshchensk and enrolled in the computer science and applied mathematics program at Saint Petersburg State University of Economics.

Karaseva had been dancing from the age of five, and at the university she was actively involved in extracurricular activities, her acquaintances told Bumaga. In the autumn of 2023, [the university’s website] mentioned her as a fourth-year student who was a choreographer for the university’s dance team. She worked on a performance celebrating the fifth anniversary of the National Guard department at the Military Institute’s Logistics Academy.

“We worked together on a student talent show. She was responsible for staging the team’s dance numbers. She led a very active lifestyle and was involved in extracurricular activities. She cared about people who needed help. She used to work as a choreographer for children’s dance groups,” said Alisa, a female university acquaintance of Karaseva’s.

While studying at the University of Economics, Karaseva lived at the Inter-University Student Campus (ISC) near the Park Pobedy metro station and competed in the 2023 Miss and Mister ISC contest. According to another university acquaintance of Karaseva’s (who wished to remain anonymous), Karaseva was often short of money, so she took various part-time jobs.

“Frankly, this situation has been a huge shock to me,” said the acquaintance. “Never in my life would I have believed that Sasha could do such a thing. As long as I have known her, she never raised the topic of politics. I’m pretty sure she didn’t do it out of choice. It was probably out of desperation. She was either conned or had money problems.

A few months ago, Karaseva had transferred to the Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University, according to Channel 78. One of Karaseva’s acquaintances also told Bumaga that Karaseva was no longer enrolled at the University of Economics. Officials at the Herzen told Fontanka.ru that a young woman with the same name had recently been expelled from the pedagogical university for skipping classes.

Karaseva’s immediate family members ignored our requests to comment on the story.

Over three day, twenty-one criminal cases were launched in Russia for arson attempts and the pouring of brilliant green dye solution on ballots at polling stations. Some suspects report they were promised payment

Sixty-one criminal cases relating to the presidential election were launched in Russia over the three days of voting, First Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Gorovoy reported on the evening of 17 March. Twenty-one of these cases involved arson attempts at polling stations and attempts to spoil ballot boxes with brilliant green dye solution: they were charged as “obstruction of voting rights.”

In addition to Karaseva, people in other regions of Russia also brought Molotov cocktails and brilliant green dye solution to polling stations. Most cases were recorded on the first day of voting. Here are just a few of them:

  • A criminal case was launched against a 58-year-old resident of Kogalym who set fire to her ballot and ballot box at a polling station.
  • Charges were filed against a resident of Volzhsky, in the Volgograd Region, who poured brilliant green dye solution on a ballot box and the ballots in it. The woman herself said that she had been offered a “monetary reward of thirty [thousand rubles]” for spoiling the ballot box.
  • 20-year-old Alina Nevmyanova, who poured green paint into a ballot box at a polling station in Moscow on 15 March 15, was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention centre. According to Baza, the young woman “had received instructions from someone over the phone.”
  • A Moscow pensioner by the name of Petrukhina, who suffers from cancer and who, according to Mediazona, set fire to voting booths, was placed under house arrest.

In most cases, the suspects in these criminal cases have repented and admitted their guilt. In some cases, they reported that they did it for the money, while eyewitnesses claim that the defendants were allegedly instructed by phone before attempting arson or spoiling ballots with brilliant green dye solution. The details in many of the incidents are still emerging, however.

No Ukrainian organizations have claimed responsibility for the incidents that took place during the Russian elections.

Since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine, acts of sabotage in Russia have been widespread, and they are often committed for payment or after conversations with phone scammers. In Petersburg, they most often have involved arson attacks on military infrastructures, such as military enlistment offices and railroad relay boxes. According to police investigators, the relay box arsonists have usually been hired by persons unknown through Telegram channels for job seekers. For example, the first person convicted of sabotage in Petersburg, Vyacheslav Zaitsev, who was eighteen at the time of his arrest, agreed to destroy a relay box on the railroad in return for ten thousand rubles [approx. 100 euros]. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Zhumagul Kurbanova, a 66-year-old employee of a Pyaterochka convenience store in Petersburg, told police officers that she had received a phone call from a certain “Alexander Fyodorovich,” who convinced her to set fire to the door of the military enlistment office on English Avenue, as there were allegedly fraudsters operating there. Kurbanova was sentenced to ten years in prison.

The State Duma has proposed increasing the punishment for attempts to disrupt elections to eight years in prison. Currently, people who torch and vandalize ballot boxes face a maximum of five years in prison

Shortly after a dozen cases of inept “sabotage” at polling stations were recored in Russia on the first day of the election, State Duma deputies proposed toughening the punishment for attempting to disrupt elections by “generally dangerous means” by up to eight years’ imprisonment. Yana Lantratova (A Just Russia–For Truth), a member of the Duma committee investigating foreign interference in Russia’s internal affairs, reported that a bill to this effect was being drafted.

Currently, Article 141.2 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code—”obstructing the exercise of voting rights or the work of election commissions by conspiring to influence the outcome of the vote”—carries a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment. Attempts to set fire to polling stations or pour brilliant green dye solution on ballot boxes most often triggered charges of violating this particular article.

Source: “Desperate, deceived, and hard up for money: 21-year-old Alexandra Karaseva threw a Molotov cocktail at a school on election day—now she faces up to five years in prison,” Bumaga, 19 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Degenerate Art

The FSB has opened a criminal case on charges of “high treason” against artist and former Mediazona publisher Pyotr Verzilov. The details of the case are not yet known, but as part of their investigation, law enforcers raided the homes of a number of artists and activists across Russia. Many of those whom the law enforcers raided are not personally acquainted with Verzilov.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, people identifying themselves as FSB officers searched the home of Petersburg artist Katrin Nenasheva and her girlfriend Natasha Chetverio. Nenasheva was taken away for questioning, while Chetverio was released, but both had their electronic devices confiscated. The homes of artist Sasha Blot, Party of the Dead activist Kristina Bubentsova, illustrator Vladlena Milkina, and architect Alexandra Kachko were also searched in St. Petersburg.

Law enforcers simultaneously raided the apartments of Verzilov’s mother Yelena, members of the art group Yav, actionist Anastasia Mikhailova (an associate of the artist Pavel Krisevich), and Pussy Riot members Rita Flores, Olga Pakhtusova, and Olga Kuracheva. The latter two were involved in the action “The Policemen Enters the Game”: along with Verzilov, they ran out onto the field of a Moscow stadium during a World Cup match there.

In Moscow, a female acquaintance of the artist Philippenzo (who is now in exile) was taken from her flat. The Yekaterinburg artist Ilya Mozgi and the Ulyanovsk artist Ilya Kholtov were both taken away for questioning after their homes were searched. Nizhny Novgorod artists Artem Filatov and Andrei Olenev were questioned. Samara artist Denis Mustafin’s home was searched. Although he was not at home, his mother’s computer was confiscated.

Some of these have already been released from interrogation (Nenasheva and Kholtov, for example), while others are still being questioned. It is known that most of them have now been designated as “witnesses” in the case against Verzilov. Many of them were asked about their connection to Verzilov: many did not know him personally and had never had much contact with him. Kristina Gorlanova, the former director of the Urals branch of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, located in Ekaterinburg, whose home was also searched, said that she had “heard nothing” about the “artist” who occasioned the search.

It is still unclear what gave rise to the criminal case. Under new legislation, however, switching to the enemy’s side during a war can be considered “state treason” can be considered as switching to the enemy’s side during a war. In an interview with Yuri Dud last year, Verzilov admitted that he had originally traveled to Ukraine as a documentary filmmaker, but now he was at the front “as a military man.”

“Verzilov: Inside [the] War,” vDud, 5 October 2023. In Russian, with English subtitles

Many of the artists whose homes were raided may never have been involved in Verzilov’s activities, but they themselves have produced works about current events in Russia and Ukraine. We wrote last year about the works of Yav and Philippenzo. Mustafin was fined for flying a a Russian flag inscribed with the phrase “Today is not my day” outside the Ministry of Defense in Moscow on 12 June 2022. Milkina made a public art piece about “people who are scared” on a Petersburg square and T-shirts with the word “Peace” on them.

Source: “Law enforcers raid homes of artists and actionists on eve of elections,” WTF? newsletter (Mediazona), 12 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Petersburg artists find ways to get their messages across even amidst strict censorship. They mount underground apartment exhibitions, “tiny pickets” on city streets, and exhibitions and performances in the woods. It all smacks of the Soviet guerrilla art and actionism from which the international stars of post-Soviet conceptualism later emerged.

Bumaga explores how street art shows have gained popularity in Russia, how guerrilla art has changed in recent decades, and how today’s actionists resemble the organizers of the notorious Bulldozer Exhibition.

“I’m for peace!” Photo: Tiny Picket (Instagram)

Street exhibitions have been around since the 1960s. One of the first such projects was dubbed “the Soviet Woodstock”

Guerrilla street exhibitions in Russia date back to the so-called unofficial art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Pursuing the idea of coupling art and ideology, the authorities forced undesirable artists out of public art life.

In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev cracked down on the exhibition 30 Years of the Moscow Union of Artists, at the Moscow Manege. The Soviet premier wanted to expel all of its participants from the CPSU and the Union of Artists, although almost none of them were Party or Union members. Artists and connoisseurs reacted to political censorship in the USSR by forming an artistic underground, meaning that the most progressive art was exhibited at apartment exhibitions and in salons.

The 1970s witnessed open confrontation between the art and the world authorities. The most flamboyant members of the artistic underground were the Lianozovo school, who gathered and held exhibitions in a barrack in Moscow’s Lianozovo neighborhood. The leader of the group, Oscar Rabin, organized one of the most infamous guerrilla street exhibitions in the history of Russian art, which later became known as the Bulldozer Exhibition. On 15 September 1974, the artists staged a show of paintings in a vacant lot in Moscow’s Belyayevo Forest. The authorities sicked police on the participants and attendees and destroyed the show with bulldozers.

This crackdown on artistic expression triggered an international uproar, and the Soviet authorities made concessions. Two weeks later, the artists were allowed to hold an officially sanctioned exhibition featuring an expanded list of participants in Moscow’s Izmailovo Park.

This time the police were tolerant towards the artists and their guests: no one was detained. The exhibition lasted for several hours and, thanks to the beautiful weather, it turned into a big picnic. Western journalists dubbed the event “the Soviet Woodstock.”

Soviet unofficial artists continued this tradition, and one art group published 14 volumes documenting their activities

However, the underground’s victory at the Bulldozer Exhibition was not unequivocal. Unofficial art continued to defend its right to exist at an exhibition in the Beekeeping Pavilion at VDNKh (February 1975), at the Preliminary Apartment Previews for the All-Union Exhibition (spring 1975), and at an exhibition in the House of Culture Pavilion at VDNKh (September 1975).

These exhibitions were sanctioned, but the authorities still created a number of organizational obstacles for the artists. For example, only those artists who had a Moscow residence permit were allowed to show their work at the House of Culture. In addition, the authorities made the condition in which the artists worked unbearable: during the mounting of the show, the temperature in the pavilion topped forty degrees Celsius. Thirty-eight works were banned by the censorship commission. It is not known how many works were exhibited, ultimately, but a total of 145 artists participated in the show.

After the scandals provoked by the “unofficial” artists’ public appearances, the authorities began pursuing a policy of legalizing alternative art. In May 1976, the Painting Section of the Graphic Artists Committee was established, primarily to monitor and control the ideologically dangerous underground.

We should keep in mind that we do not have information about every single Soviet-era guerrilla exhibition. Many were held without leaving any trace in contemporary newspapers and other documents.

Collective Actions, a group led by Andrei Monastyrsky, did a huge amount of work in this sense. The artists compiled fourteen volumes documenting their Trips to the Countryside — actions during which various events took place in particular landscapes, including installations, performances, and minimalist interventions in nature. By going outdoors, the artists showed that art could be implicated in the space outside galleries and museums. Another important feature of the performances was the inclusion of viewers in the works: their participation and reactions were part and parcel of the conceptual actions. The way the actions were staged encouraged the spectators to focus on the processes of anticipating and comprehending the happenings. That is, the spectacle itself was an occasion for reflection, a statement meant to spark a dialogue.

In [1977], for example, Collective Actions simply hung a red banner between trees in the woods. The banner read: “I HAVE NO COMPLAINTS AND I LIKE EVERYTHING, ALTHOUGH I’VE NEVER BEEN HERE AND KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THESE PARTS.”

Collective Actions, Slogan (1977). Photo courtesy of New East Digital Archive via Bumaga

Guerrilla exhibitions are still organized nowadays, many of them dedicated to political prisoners

As a rule, guerrilla exhibitions and actions have a political agenda, so their organizers can be punished quite severely, even by Russian standards.

Nevertheless, there is activity in this field. For example, on 5 August 2023, Petersburg activists mounted an open-air exhibition on the Sestroretsk Ecotrail on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Sandarmokh [sic], a tract in the forests of Karelia where victims of the Great Terror were shot and buried in mass graves. Fifty works hung in the open air for a record time — almost an entire day.

Placards in support of Tyumen Case defendant Kirill Brik (left) and the release of political prisoners (right) at 2023 guerrilla exhibition in suburban Petersburg. Photos courtesy of 123ru.net via Bumaga

Several placards were also hung in the woods outside Petersburg this winter — for example, on December 10, Human Rights Day, the work I Dissent, Therefore I Am. And in January, an installation featuring a quotation from the Bulat Okudzhava song “Hope’s Little Band” was mounted outside the city.

“…and wandering amongst people / is hope’s little band, / conducted by love.” Photo: Bumaga reader
“What can I do? What would it change? Who would care? Who would help me? What do I see when I look around? What do I mean?” Part of the installation I Dissent, Therefore I Am. Photo: a Bumaga reader

In 2022, Petersburg hosted Carte Blanche, an international guerrilla street art festival. In addition to street works, a stationary exhibition at the abandoned Sailors Palace of Culture on Vindavskaya Street attracted great attention; it featured over twenty artists, including Vladimir Abikh, Maxim Ima, and Slava PTRK. That same autumn, Petersburg hosted the underground exhibition Continuity, dedicated to political prisoners of the past and present, including the victims of the Great Terror and those caught up in the Network Case. Some of the works were made by political prisoners themselves using improvised means and materials while they were incarcerated in pretrial detention centers and penal colonies.

Contemporary street exhibitions continue the Soviet tradition, but the state’s reaction to them has become tougher

Today’s guerrilla exhibitions in many ways are a continuation of the Soviet and post-Soviet tradition. The Bulldozer Exhibition can hardly be called an artistic event also. It was also a political event. It was a challenge to a repressive regime, “the first and most significant collective performance,” as art historian Yevgeny Barabanov wrote.

Since 2022, such exhibitions also have not only aesthetic but also political goals. Although in the Soviet and post-Soviet years, “unofficial” exhibitions, albeit with certain restrictions, could be legitimated [sic], since 2022, the state does not even attempt to compromise with artists.

Moreover, crackdowns against artists who voice alternative opinions have reached a new level. In 1991, the Moscow actionist Anatoly Osmolovsky and his group E.T.I. used their bodies to spell an indecent word for the phallus [khui] on Red Square. After the action, Osmolovsky was detained and threatened with charges of “malicious disorderly conduct.” However, thanks to the petitions submitted to the authorities by his art world colleagues and the Memorial Society, Osmolovsky was soon released.

Nowadays, petitions and statements of support are not enough to get artists acquitted. Sasha Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army. The young woman replaced price tags at a Perekrestok chain grocery store with anti-war messages.

Source: “Placards in the woods and art shows in flats: how this differs from Soviet guerrilla art,” Bumaga, 12 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Yesterday’s Top Stories

Good evening, friends. Here are the main news of the day:

— The Gulf of Finland has turned green. What is happening and how is it related to the heat? https://t.me/paperpaper_ru/27596

— Supplies of premium headphones manufactured by Sennheiser, Marshall, Sony and JBL are running out in Russia, Kommersant writes. Here is the rundown on supplies in St. Petersburg: https://ppr.today/9MGEytX

— [Russian online retailer] Wildberries has changed the name on the main page of its website. It now calls itself Yagodki [“Berries”]: https://t.me/paperpaper_ru/27604

— iStories talked to [Russian] soldiers traced to shootings and robberies in the Kyiv region. One confessed to everything: https://ppr.today/e3hRqev

— There are 24 free beds for coronavirus patients in St. Petersburg. The authorities will convert two more hospitals to covid wards: https://t.me/paperpaper_ru/27611

— Petersburgers are getting “subpoenas” and telephone calls recruiting them to fight in Ukraine. Those who do not want to fight are asked to sign a “waiver”: https://ppr.today/rY0KrCX

Photo caption: see what the Perseid meteor shower looks like in the countryside near Petersburg: https://ppr.today/GChPNeX

Source: Bumaga (Telegram), 15 August 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader