Putin's Puppets Are Growing Heavy
White Scarfs Protests, Regional Protests, Failing Public Infrastructure
Dear BWR Subscribers,
“Barbershop Whispers….Russia” begins with “My Takeaways” on the main topic, followed by the main topic discussion. The last two sections of “Barbershop Whispers…Russia” are “Follow-ups” regarding previous publications and “Quick Bites” briefly addressing emerging events.
This past Wednesday (17 January) was the first publication of “MT799 Authenticated”, BWR’s twice-a-month independent contributors’ column – to be published on the 1st and 15th of each month. “The Case for Confiscating the Central Bank of Russia’s $351B+ Foreign Reserves” was written by Jamison Firestone, Esq., a seasoned Russia expert and former employer of Sergei Magnitsky, for whom the Global Magnitsky Act was named.
In last week’s BWR, I discussed the egg shortage and what it means for the Russian economy and the upcoming presidential election. The egg shortage is a symptom of long-festering larger and accumulating systemic problems now coming to the surface because of Putin’s unprovoked war on Ukraine.
In this week’s BWR, I will discuss the threats to Putin’s power: grassroots movements and the people’s deteriorating living standards. Inflation, the shortage of eggs, and now no heat!
Takeaways:
GRASSROOTS PROTESTS: The Kremlin is being challenged by pockets of civil grassroots movements. Sporadic protests organized by women over the indefinite deployment of their mobilized loved ones have begun but so far remain contained by the Kremlin. In October 2023, we saw mobilization protests, mostly in the impoverished provinces. This week we saw an unusual protest of 4,000 in the autonomous Republic of Bashkortostan over the sentencing of a 37-year-old activist.
FAILING PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE: At the center of Putin’s social contract with the citizenry has been stable and rising living standards. Between rising food inflation, as evidenced by the price of eggs, and now the public sector’s inability to provide basic heating services – public confidence in Putin’s ability to deliver on his social contract is again being questioned.
Grassroots Movements:
White Scarfs:
The mothers, wives, and daughters of soldiers have been silently organizing since the beginning of the war and these grassroots organizations are beginning to gain momentum. One of the most recent and rare public displays of protest occurred in Moscow at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin walls.
Members of the “Путь Домой" (Way Home) group, women calling for the demobilization of their loved ones from the front, showed up wearing white scarves, the symbol of their movement, to lay carnations at the tomb.
Way Home has 40,000 subscribers on Telegram and is one of the most visible grassroots women’s groups representing soldiers. They have published a detailed manifesto on their channel calling for the demobilization of civilians from the Ukrainian front and calling the Kremlin’s infinite deployment of their loved ones akin to slavery.
The Kremlin has employed various strategies to defer the need for another mobilization before the March presidential elections. This includes continuing to recruit from prisons in exchange for pardons (if one survives the front), recruiting foreigners with criminal records and/or from impoverished countries in exchange for citizenship, and deploying troops indefinitely (i.e., without any rotation).
Once the March elections are over, another spring mobilization will likely be called.
Bashkortostan Protests
An estimated 4,000 protesters gathered in support of 37-year-old Fayil Alsynov, an activist sentenced to 4 years in a penal colony for “inciting interethnic hatred.” The charge was instigated by the Kremlin-appointed head of the Bashkortostan Republic, Radiy Khabirov.
Alsynov’s protests arose from the proposed limestone mining project by the Bashkir Soda Company (BSK), a firm linked to oligarchs Boris and Arkady Rotenberg, which would see the Kushtau chalk hill razed to the ground. The mountain is considered a sacred site by the ethnic Bashkirs.
Failing Public Infrastructure
Two dozen regions have experienced severe heating outages this winter as Father Frost brought temperatures of- 30C across Russia, testing the limits of the country’s aging and neglected Soviet-era infrastructure. These outages have occurred across the country, from the commuter suburbs of greater Moscow to the heart of major industrial cities such as Nizhny Novgorod and Novosibirsk.
Russia’s heating system is still primarily based on the Soviet-era design of centralized heating, in which giant boiler plants are located on the city's outskirts and connected to residential areas through a maze of city pipes. The Soviet design was intended to deliver heat for industry, then its citizens. It was not unusual for the local factories to be responsible for the boiler plant.
As many BWR subscribers have experienced, hot water in many Russian cities is shut off in early summer for annual 30-day maintenance service and repairs.
In the case of Klimovsk, a city some 40KM south of Moscow, a fractured municipal public works pipe outside the territory of the Klimovsk Specialized Ammunition Plant resulted in a boiler shutdown.
The fracture pipe occurred on 3 January and left 20,000 residents without power. By 10 January, 30 out of the 176 affected residential buildings still had no heat.
In Novosibirsk, one cracked pipe has cut off the hot water supply for about half the city's 1.5M residents. Novosibirsk region Governor Andrei Travnikov wrote on his Telegram Channel:
“Unfortunately, in the area of the heating system failure... things are getting worse….Utility workers discovered three pipe leaks in a single Novosibirsk neighborhood over the past 24 hours.”
In many parts of the country, steel pipes installed in the 1960s-80s have long exceeded their life expectancy. Such pipes account for nearly 44% of utility infrastructure, according to figures from the state statistics agency Rosstat.
Billions of dollars have been spent on the annual maintenance of municipal infrastructure since the 1990s, yet nearly 44% of the infrastructure is past its expiration date. Why? As per Sergei Boiko, an exiled former Novosibirsk city council deputy and Navalny ally,
“local government officials pocket the money allocated to infrastructure maintenance, and this has been going on for decades…now with the demand for resources for the war, even less will be allocated to infrastructure.”
Now that nearly 40% of the Russian government’s budget will go towards supporting the war on Ukraine, what is left for the people, e.g., civil infrastructure, etc. Funding for the war will come at the expense of the people in both treasure and blood.
Follow-ups & Quick Bites:
Follow-ups:
Nothing to report this week.
Quick Bites
Ukrainian Drone Strikes Russian Oil Depot in St. Petersburg
A Ukrainian drone struck an oil storage depot in western Russia on Friday, causing a massive blaze, officials said, as Kyiv’s forces extended their attacks on Russian soil ahead of the war’s second anniversary.
Four oil reservoirs with a total capacity of 6,000 cubic meters (1.6 million gallons) were set on fire when the drone reached Klintsy, a city of some 70,000 people located about 60 kilometers (40 miles) from the Ukrainian border, according to the local governor and state news agency TASS.
Lukoil’s NORSI Reducing Output to Half
Russia’s fourth-largest, Lukoil’s NORSI oil refinery located in Kstovo (Nizhnigordskaya Oblast), experienced problems with a catalytic cracking and reformer unit, causing a production stoppage on 4 January.
The plant will halve production of high-octane gasoline, likely forcing Lukoil to buy gasoline on the open market for its petrol stations.
NORSI produced 4.51 million tons of gasoline from January to November 2023.
Vol 2, No 04 - BWR 21.01.2024
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