Russia Reform Monitor: No. 2069

May 17:

Russia is responding to the inauguration of a new missile defense installation in Romania with a military initiative of its own. According to UPI, Russia's government has restarted the production of "combat rail-based missile systems" - that is, military trains carrying missiles, a platform that served as a staple of the country's strategic arsenal during the Cold War and after but was suspended in recent years. According to Russia's Defense Ministry, the new Barguzin rail-based system is expected to be inaugurated into the country's Strategic Rocket Forces around 2020.

May 18:

Are Russian clandestine services exploiting a weakened Swedish defense system? Swedish authorities think so. According to London's Guardian newspaper, a 300-meter-high telecommunications tower recently collapsed in southwestern Sweden in what officials in Stockholm have confirmed was sabotage, with the Kremlin as the main suspected culprit. The sabotage comes in the wake of Sweden's decision to join NATO, and amid warnings from Russia's foreign ministry that doing so would bring "consequences."

Russia continues to obstruct Ukraine's attempts to demand greater accountability from its former Prime Minister. Radio Svoboda reports that Russia has officially refused a request by Ukrainian State Prosecutor Sergei Gorbatyuk to extradite former Premier Viktor Yanukovych back to Ukraine, where he is currently the focus of seven different criminal proceedings stemming from his actions during the 2013 pro-Western “Maidan” protests and related events. Ukrainian authorities are now left seeking different means of bringing their former leader to justice; "we are now going to inquire [with the Kremlin] as to how to interrogate him in Russia," Gorbatyuk has said.

May 19:

Russia's security forces have come up with a novel justification for the high-profile 2015 detention of performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky. Last November, Pavlensky set fire to the door of the old headquarters of the Soviet KGB (and now the home of its successor, the FSB) in Moscow's Lubyanka Square. The political activist is now standing trial, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that the prosecution has charged him with "damaging a cultural monument" because, the government indictment says, "leading cultural figures were held under arrest there in the 1930s."

The charges have observers crying foul. "Following that logic, we would have to acknowledge the cultural value of the Cheka pistol with which cultural figures were shot, and the bullets as well," former Soviet dissident Aleksandr Podrabinek wrote. Similarly, Journalist Arkady Dubnov has charged that the logic behind the prosecution's charges was worthy of "the great absurdists" of literature.

The average salary of a Russian worker has dipped below that of his Chinese counterpart, one of Russia's leading banks has estimated. The Moscow Times reports Sberbank chief analyst Mikhail Matovnikov as estimating that "[l]abor in Russia is now cheaper than in China." In a recent presentation before shareholders in St. Petersburg, Matovnikov laid out that worsening economic conditions within Russia has led to falling wages, and that the average monthly salary in Russia is now $433 - "lower than in Serbia, Romania, China and Poland."