The Naked Pravda

On June 23, 2023, hours before Yevgeny Prigozhin would shock the world by staging a mutiny against the Russian military, Meduza co-founder and CEO Galina Timchenko learned that her iPhone had been infected months earlier with “Pegasus.” The spyware’s Israeli designers market the product as a crimefighting super-tool against “terrorists, criminals, and pedophiles,” but states around the world have abused Pegasus to track critics and political adversaries who sometimes end up arrested or even murdered. Access to Pegasus isn’t cheap: Researchers believe the service costs tens of millions of dollars, meaning that somebody — some government agency out there — paid maybe a million bucks to hijack Timchenko’s smartphone. Why would somebody do that? How would somebody do that? And who could have done it? For answers, The Naked Pravda turned to two experts: Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel for Access Now, a nonprofit organization committed to “defending and extending” the digital civil rights of people worldwide, and John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory at the University of Toronto that investigates digital espionage against civil society. Timestamps for this episode: (3:39) Galina Timchenko’s hacked iPhone is the first confirmed case of a Pegasus infection against a Russian journalist (6:16) NSO Group’s different contract tiers for Pegasus users (9:59) How aware is NSO Group of Pegasus’s rampant misuse? (12:29) Why hasn’t Europe done more to restrict the use of such spyware? (15:50) Russian allies using Pegasus (17:58) E.U. members using Pegasus (21:37) Training required to use Pegasus and the spyware’s technical side (27:38) The forensics needed to detect a Pegasus infection (35:46) Is Pegasus built more to find criminals or members of civil society? (40:10) Imagining a global moratorium on military-grade spyware (43:22) “A German solution” (45:14) Where the West goes from hereКак поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

This week’s show tackles Russia’s 2023 regional elections, scheduled for Sunday, September 10, though several regions will keep polling stations open all weekend. “Up for grabs” in contests with mostly predetermined outcomes are 26 gubernatorial offices and seats in 20 regional parliaments. There’s also a whole mess of municipal and local races. Occupying forces in four regions of Ukraine are staging votes, too. Foreign Policy Research Institute Eurasia Program Fellow András Tóth-Czifra joined the podcast to explain what’s at stake, how Russian voting has evolved over the years, and why some pockets of competitive politics persist. To learn about the challenges of monitoring Russian elections today and the remaining opportunities for “protest voting,” The Naked Pravda spoke to University of Bonn social scientist Dr. Galina Selivanova. Timestamps for this episode: (2:20) What’s at stake in this weekend’s voting (7:54) Pockets of competition (16:12) “Golos” election monitors (28:51) How election fraud works in Russia (32:35) Apathetic voters and protest potential at the pollsКак поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

How complicit are ordinary Russians in the invasion of Ukraine? That’s a question at the core of Russia’s War, a book published this May, where author Jade McGlynn explores what she calls “the grievances, lies, and half-truths that pervade the Russian worldview,” arguing that too many people in Russia have “invested too deeply in the Kremlin’s alternative narratives” to see the war in Ukraine as the brutal assault it is. Dr. McGlynn specializes in Russian media, memory, and foreign policy at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Follow her here on 𝕏 (formerly known as Twitter). You can find Russia’s War on Amazon and wherever books are sold. Timestamps for this episode: (2:13) What’s so special about PIR Center director Vladimir Orlov? (8:03) Russians’ moral culpability in the war (13:30) Zelensky’s role and the war’s heroes and villains (15:43) Analyzing Russian Telegram channels during the war (19:11) Russia’s anti-Kremlin opposition during the war (22:30) Changing Russians’ minds from abroadКак поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

A new Russian history textbook justifies the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, with pages dedicated to Putin and Stalin. The podcast dissects the authors' backgrounds, explores Mgimos University's controversy, and analyzes the trend of rewriting history. It criticizes the selective and emotional aspects of the textbook, highlighting its failure to create a compelling narrative.

“This is a history of a place that doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as Eastern Europe anymore. No one comes from there.”  These are the opening lines of Goodbye, Eastern Europe, a new book by writer and historian Jacob Mikanowski that offers a sweeping history of a region that he argues is disappearing. Not in the literal sense, of course; the lands historically considered “Eastern Europe” are very much still there. But the term itself (much like “post-Soviet” and “former Soviet republics”) has fallen out of fashion. And the entangled diversity that was once the hallmark of Eastern European societies was swept away by the violence of the 20th century — so much so that Mikanowski considers it a “lost world.” Recounting centuries of history in just a few hundred pages, Mikanowski’s book takes readers on a journey across the region stretching between present-day Germany and Russia, going as far north as the Baltic countries and as far south as the Balkans. And while the empires that once ruled there and the nation-states that succeeded them are part of the picture, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is far from your standard political history. Instead, Mikanowski weaves together years of research and travel experience with his own family’s past, opening a window into the complexities and absurdities of everyday life.  “A lot of histories of Eastern Europe [...] are very much like a battle between superpowers,” Mikanowski tells Eilish Hart, editor of Meduza’s weekly newsletter The Beet, on this week’s show. “I want to tell the story of what’s happening in between. Because to me, that’s the Eastern European experience — especially in the 20th century. Finding agency amid a world that’s constantly robbing you of it.” Timestamps for this episode: (2:12) What — and where — is Eastern Europe? And in what sense is it disappearing? (4:37) Blending academic research with travel experience and family history (11:07) Why there’s more to Eastern European history than “Hitler versus Stalin”  (13:56) Eastern Europe as a “lost world” of interwoven diversity (16:50) What’s missed when history is written from imperial capitals? (19:21) The politics of history in Eastern Europe todayКак поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny famously returned to Moscow in January 2021, where he was promptly arrested at the airport for supposed parole violations. A month later, his suspended sentence was replaced with a 2.5-year prison sentence. Roughly a year later, in March 2022, a judge added another nine years to his prison term, convicting him in a kangaroo court of embezzlement and contempt of court. So, Navalny has at least another decade of imprisonment ahead of him, but it will likely be far more. In a new trial with a verdict expected on Friday, August 4, public prosecutors have asked a judge to sentence Navalny to an additional 20 years in prison on charges of “creating an extremist organization,” “inciting extremism,” and creating a nonprofit organization that infringed on Russian citizens’ rights, financed extremism, and involved minors in dangerous activities. Oh, and they say he “rehabilitated Nazism.” In late April, the prosecution dumped a 196-volume case file on Navalny, and the court gave him a week to review the materials. Before this, Navalny had said he expects to be charged in a separate case, in a military court actually, for crimes related to “terrorism,” probably facing life imprisonment.  Ahead of the verdict in this latest case against Russia’s best-known anti-Kremlin opposition leader, The Naked Pravda spoke to political scientist Mikhail Turchenko and Wilson Center senior adviser and Meduza Ideas editor Maxim Trudolyubov about Alexey Navalny, his movement, and about how he’s changed Russian politics even as he languishes behind bars.Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

In the final week before the State Duma’s summer recess, Russian lawmakers have been ramming through some curious legislation, including several initiatives the authorities would apparently like to roll out now before Putin’s re-election campaign presumably kicks off in the fall. Notably, one last-minute amendment empowers the president to charge governors with the creation of “special militarized formations” during periods of mobilization, wartime, and martial law. These new armed groups, controlled by the state but separate from the military, will be yet another factor in Russia’s complicated civil-military relations — a subject that’s gained even more global attention in the aftermath of last month’s mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group mercenaries. To learn more about the “specialized enterprises” forged in this new legislation and to explore what such a project says about the relationship between the military and everything else in Russia, Meduza welcomes back Kirill Shamiev, a Russian political scientist and a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, who recently wrote an essay on this subject for Carnegie Politika, titled “Suspensions, Detentions, and Mutinies: The Growing Gulf in Russia’s Civil-Military Relations.” Timestamps for this episode: (3:27) Is the Russian military’s chief struggle that Putin values loyalty over competence? (7:56) Former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov’s reforms and civilian innovations (10:51) Putin’s reluctance to spend political capital (15:23) Russia’s forthcoming “specialized militarized formations”Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Since the early aftermath of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many major Western companies have been in various stages of divesting from Russia. Nearly a year and a half into the war, we’ve entered a new phase of business relations, as the Kremlin has started nationalizing foreign companies’ Russian assets. The latest watershed moment occurred on April 25, when Putin issued an executive order allowing the Russian authorities to place the Russian assets of companies from “unfriendly nations” under the state’s “temporary administration.” As a result, Russia seized the assets of Uniper Russia, including Uniper’s 84% stake in the power generation company Unipro, which was valued at $5.5 billion before the invasion. More recently, earlier this week, President Putin placed the Russian subsidiaries of French yogurt maker Danone and Danish brewer Carlsberg under the Russian state’s “temporary management,” effectively seizing these businesses. The Federal Property Management Agency has already entrusted Danone Russia’s CEO position to Ramzan Kadyrov’s nephew. For some guidance through this tumultuous period of international sanctions and elite business politics in Russia, Meduza spoke to Alexandra Prokopenko, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, who worked at Russia’s Central Bank and at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow from 2017 until early 2022. Timestamps for this episode: (2:15) Putin seizes Unipro (4:23) Putin seizes Danone Russia and Baltika (8:55) Has the war been good for business? (12:59) Where’s the business community stand on the invasion? (15:26) The fight over Western assets (17:23) Chinese business interests (and unease) in all these confiscations and fire salesКак поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

The podcast discusses a joint investigation that estimates the number of Russian combatants killed in the invasion of Ukraine to be 47,000. They explore the reactions to the investigation, discuss rates of inheritance claims for different types of combatants, explain confidence levels and calculation methodology, and analyze geographic trends in inheritance cases in Russia.

Moscow and Kyiv have traded allegations that the other side is planning a disastrous attack on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant that they warn could cause a major radiological event. Last week, Ukrainian President Zelensky warned that Russian occupation forces have placed “objects resembling explosives” on some rooftops at the power station, “perhaps to simulate an attack on the plant.” Officials in Moscow, on the other hand, have their own allegations, claiming that Ukraine plans to frame Russian troops for an attack on the plant. Meanwhile, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency are on the ground but still aren’t getting unrestricted access. On July 7, the IAEA reported that they visited the isolation gate separating the cooling pond from what remains of the Kakhovka reservoir after the destruction of the downstream dam a month ago. They found no leakage from the pond, and they’ve observed no visible indications of mines or explosives anywhere inside the plant, but they still haven’t been allowed onto the rooftops of reactor units 3 and 4 and parts of the turbine halls. To make sense of these reports and to respond to the panic that this situation provokes, The Naked Pravda welcomes back nuclear arms expert Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research. Timestamps for this episode: (4:37) Why it’s wrong to fear a repeat of the Chernobyl or Fukushima disasters at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (9:48) Disagreements among nuclear experts about the dangers now in Ukraine (13:06) Weighing the reports and allegations from Moscow and Kyiv (18:22) Escalating rhetoric about nuclear weapons in Russia’s foreign-policy expert community (23:12) Why there are probably no Russian nukes in Belarus, at least not yetКак поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно