July 31:
Russia's ongoing fiscal woes are ratcheting up the price of payoffs to officials, NBC News reports. According to the news outlet, the average price of a bribe or payoff to a government official - a commonplace occurrence within Russia - has more than doubled since last year, and now stands at some $3,500. The reason has to do with the declining purchasing power of ordinary Russians, NBC explains: while "the average bribe in the equivalent dollar amount has not changed" over the past year, "failing oil prices and Western sanctions have halved the value of the ruble against the dollar."
Russian president Vladimir Putin "personally ordered" the killing of former intelligence agent turned dissident Alexander Litvinenko, a London court has heard. The BBC reports that in his closing remarks to a governmental inquiry into Litvinenko's 2006 poisoning, Ben Emerson, an attorney for the Litvinenko family, declared that the culpability of the Russian state has been proven "beyond reasonable doubt." The "personal cabal" of Russia's president is "willing to murder those who stand in their way," Mr Emmerson said, and Mr. Litvinenko - a whistleblower who charged that the Kremlin ordered the 1998 assassination of oligarch Boris Berezovsky - became a key target because of his public declarations and prominent profile. "If the Russian state is responsible, Vladimir Putin is responsible... because he personally ordered the liquidation of an enemy who was bent on exposing him and his cronies."
The Kremlin is poised to take its campaign against alternative lifestyles to a new level. According to the BBC, a prominent Russian lawmaker has launched a formal investigation via the state media watchdog, ROSKOMNODZOR, into whether the use of "emojis" (social media characters) that depict same sex couples or other "gay" images runs afoul of a 2013 law and should be criminalized. That law "prohibits the promotion of non-traditional sexual relationships," something which the senator in question - Mikhail Marchenko of the LDPR - charges that use of the icons does.
August 1:
Russia's Civic Chamber, the country's main official civil society watchdog, has launched a dedicated telephone hotline "on issues related to the fight against ISIL," Sputnik reports. The initiative is part of the Kremlin's efforts to stem the growing appeal of, and recruitment by, the terrorist group. The phone line is intended as a sort of crisis line for "any Russian citizen fearing that their family members and relatives could be under the threat of being recruited by the ISIL militant group." Information or actionable intelligence gleaned as a result "will be thoroughly reviewed in coordination with professional psychologists, the National Anti-Terrorism Committee, [and] law enforcement agencies," the Civic Chamber has said.
August 3:
In the face of Western sanctions and the continued low price of world oil, Russia's economic prospects continue to dim. The Wall Street Journal reports that, in its most recent economic outlook, the International Monetary Fund has warned that Russia's economy is expected to constrict by 3.4 percent in 2015. Moreover, without a change of policy leading to the lifting of Western sanctions, "Russia's economy faces the loss of as much as 9% of the inflation-adjusted value of the goods and services it produces," the paper reports the IMF as predicting.
Russians are broadly supportive of their government's efforts to stifle the World-Wide Web, a new study has found. Latvian news portal Meduza reports that the latest survey conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) details that 58 percent of respondents "would support shutting down the Internet entirely." Forty-nine percent of respondents, meanwhile, signaled their approval for Internet "censorship," to varying degrees. And forty-five percent of those polled support the filtering of foreign news content - roughly the same amount as believed that "it is necessary to block social media groups dedicated to organizing anti-government protests."
[EDITOR'S NOTE’: Given the effect of Russia's increasingly authoritarian political climate on pollsters and respondents alike, the results of public opinion surveys in Russia should be viewed with some caution.]
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