October 19:
Fed up with national elections widely considered corrupt, Russia’s opposition activists are organizing their own. The BBC reports that the election, which will be conducted both online and in person, will select a 45-member Coordination Council (CC) to lead the country's opposition movement. Activists hope the CC will rejuvenate the movement, which began to flounder after the public outcry over last year’s elections tapered out. The organizers hope the election will spread the opposition movement’s message to the rural areas of Russia that largely remain loyal to the Kremlin. Of the 150,000 people currently registered to vote, 65 percent reside outside Moscow.
October 21:
Russian security services are claiming a “considerable” victory over the insurgency in the North Caucasus region, as forces killed 49 rebels and captured “dozens more.” Since the beginning of the counterterrorism offensive two months ago, officials claim that over 90 militant bases and 26 weapons caches have been destroyed, while as many as 313 insurgents have been killed. The offensive is part of a larger effort to stabilize the region ahead of the 2014 Sochi Olympics, reports the New York Times, as well as the 2018 World Cup.
October 22:
Two of the three arrested members of the punk band Pussy Riot were sent to prison camps in Russia’s Far East. According to Reuters, the decision was made despite requests from both women to serve their prison sentences in Moscow in order to remain close to their young children. Although officials did not identify which camps the women were sent to, supporters of the band on Twitter suggested that one woman was sent to Mordovia, about 300 miles east of Moscow, while the other was sent to the Perm region near the Ural Mountains, about 700 miles east of the capitol. The third member of the trio, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released after her lawyer appealed.
October 23:
As expected, Russia’s lower house of parliament voted almost unanimously to pass a controversial bill expanding the definition of treason. The Just Russia party was the only faction that didn’t vote for the bill, reports the Wall Street Journal
, although it stopped short of voting against it. The party’s leader, Sergei Mironov, echoed the concerns of the country’s rights activists, who argue that the ambiguous wording of the bill could be used as a further deterrent to dissent. The proposed amendment will expand the existing definition of treason as “espionage or other assistance to a foreign state damaging Russia’s external security,” to include acts against Russia’s “constitutional order, sovereignty and territorial and state integrity.” “It would allow them to put any civil activist, let alone rights defender, in custody,” warned prominent activist Lev Ponomaryov. “It will place a sword over the head of anyone who is maintaining contacts with foreigners.”
October 24:
The opposition’s elections were successfully conducted, claiming the participation of 80,000 voters. The total represents the second-largest online vote in history, according to the World Affairs Journal blog of Vladimir Kara-Murza, one of the election’s victors. Joining Kara-Murza at the head of the opposition are Alexei Navalny, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and leftist leader, Sergei Udaltsov, who is currently involved in a criminal investigation by Russia’s security services. Kara-Murza accused the Kremlin of attempting to sabotage the elections, as only days before the vote, the Russian Investigative Committee opened an investigation against the election’s organizers, and nearly the entire first day of voting was plagued by coordinated cyber attacks on the online polling stations. “What happens next,” he concluded, “will depend on the opposition’s ability to mount a peaceful counteroffensive in the form of renewed street protests, and to show the Kremlin that a crackdown will only fuel the movement against authoritarian rule.”
October 25:
The Kremlin immediately struck back at the opposition’s newly-elected leaders, rousing tensions once more with the United States in the process. Leonid Razvozzhayev, elected in this week’s vote for the Coordination Council, was implicated in the investigation of fellow Council leader Sergei Udaltsov, who is accused of taking payment from Georgian officials to start riots in Russia. After both Udaltsov and his assistant Konstantin Lebedev were arrested, Razvozzhayev fled to Ukraine. As he left the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, where he sought asylum from the Kremlin, Razvozzhayev claims Russian security forces snatched him on the street, returned him to Russia, and tortured him for two days in order to force him to sign a confession to the plot.