October 26:
Yevgeny Roizman, an activist credited for cleaning up the streets of Yekaterinburg, is quickly building a name for himself, reports The Times Israel. Elected mayor of the city last month over the candidate of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party (a rare event itself), Roizman is also the founder of City Without Drugs, the controversial organization that engages in practices including kidnapping drug addicts and chaining them to metal beds while they suffer through withdrawal. Although Roizman credits the organization with ending the growing drug problem in Yekaterinburg in the early 2000s, the group has been the subject of several police investigations. Two of the organization’s activists are currently on trial over the death of one addict, who died after being chained to a bed by City Without Drugs. “In fighting the drug problem, he did illegal things that I couldn’t condone,” said one activist who used to work with Roizman. “He is too harsh. To Roizman, anyone who tried drugs is a junkie that needs to be punished.”
October 28:
A new survey compiled by the Motion Picture Association of America identifies websites registered in China, Russia, Ukraine, and Canada as the “most notorious” markets for illegal distribution of pirated movies and television shows. The LA Times reports that the top sites named on the list included Extratorrent.com, based in Ukraine, which had 16.1 million visitors in August of this year, and Rutracker.org, a Russian-based site that ranks among the most popular BitTorrent sites in the world, which had 11.7 million unique visitors in the same period. “The criminals who profit from the most notorious markets through the world threaten the very heart of our industry and in doing so threaten the livelihoods of the people who give it life,” said the author of the survey. “These markets are an immediate threat to legitimate commerce, impairing legitimate markets’ viability and curbing U.S. competitiveness.”
October 29:
Russia and Ukraine edged closer to another gas war this week, as the Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom complained over outstanding debts in Kiev. “We are deeply concerned about the arrears accumulated by Ukraine for supplies of Russian natural gas,” said Gazprom’s chief executive, insisting that as a result of “concessions” made to Ukraine, including discount and paid transit of gas, Kiev owes the company $882 million. According to The Guardian, Russian officials insist that the sudden cut off of payments is a ploy to stoke European favor ahead of this month’s EU summit, where Ukraine is expected to sign an association agreement with closer trade links. The two countries encountered similar spats in 2006 and 2009, when Russian officials turned off the gas flow to Ukraine, leaving many European countries without energy.
October 30:
Several U.S. officials have called on President Barack Obama to levy new sanctions on foreign banks still trading with Syria. Current sanctions already ban U.S. banks from dealing with Syria’s central bank and the Commercial Bank of Syria, Reuters reports, but do not cut off other countries’ banks that deal with the Syrian banks from access to the U.S. banking industry. Russia would be among those most affected by such sanctions. Assad’s regime currently uses second-tier Russian banks to pay for air defense systems and fighter jets, and a recent proposal sent from Damascus to Tempbank has proposed the opening of a barter account, which would allow Syria to trade goods or oil for foodstuffs. In an open letter to the U.S. Treasury urging new sanctions, several senators criticized Russian banks for their support, insisting that “this assistance eases much of the financial burden on the Assad regime, allowing it to continue military purchases and pay the soldiers that sustain the war in Syria.”
October 31:
The U.S. Treasury this week added six people and four entities to a blacklist for acting on behalf of the international crime syndicate known as the Brothers’ Circle. One of those individuals is Grigory Lepsveridze, a Russian pop star honored by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who goes by the stage name Grigory Leps. Leps was identified as a money courier for the Brothers’ Circle, Bloomberg reports, and under the penalties of the blacklist will be prohibited from conducting transactions with the United States. Russian officials reacted to the announcement with suspicion, insisting that “a citizen’s guilt should be established by the Russian legal system,” while Leps himself decried the move. “If Treasury executives think I’m a criminal, they should dig up Frank Sinatra and send him to jail,” he posted on his website. “That’s as absurd as the charges against me.”
As Syria remains embroiled in what American analysts call “a grinding war of attrition,” Russia has not-so-quietly become the Assad regime’s largest source of conventional arms. “Neither the regime nor the opposition can throw a knockout punch,” said Robert Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria. He noted that “more and more, the regime is dependent on foreign manpower,” making the Kremlin’s support all the more important. Defense News reports that with the latest increase of shipments, Russia has surpassed even Iran, the Assad regime’s biggest sponsor up to now.