Letter From the Editors

As Ukraine continued its shock offensive into Russia’s Kursk Province this week, Vladimir Putin held a televised meeting with the country’s top security officials, no doubt to show the domestic audience that things are well under control. Interestingly, it was the FSB and the National Guard that have been tasked with continuing this “counterterrorism operation.” According to Mikhail Shevchuk, this is meant to downplay the significance of the Kursk events for the Russian audience – especially the one that gets most of its news from TV. And the Russian audience is a willing participant in this show: “Sitting in the front rows, they seem to have tacitly agreed to believe what is happening on the stage.” But therein lies the rub: If “We are all actors and the whole world is a stage,” then there’s no need to rush to your nearest enlistment office to defend the motherland from foreign invaders. “The audience sincerely hates Claudius. . . but is naturally not going tear down his house on their way out of the theater,” Shevchuk concludes.

Meanwhile, the results of Germany’s investigation into the Nord Stream 2 blast also look like a bit of ham theater. The results are in, and apparently the culprit is a certain “Vladimir Z.” No, not that one. Rather, a diving instructor who, according to the German prosecutor’s office, blew up the pipelines together with a small group of enthusiasts from a private yacht, the Andromeda, that they leased from a Polish tour agency. Berlin even issued an arrest warrant for this mysterious Mr. Z – alas, Warsaw chose not to act on it while the suspect was in the country. This entire sluggish game of foot-dragging is apparently meant to tick all the right boxes for Germany (we did our due diligence) without straining relations Ukraine (we’ll keep the military aid flowing). After all, according to expert Maria Khorolskaya, “refusing military aid to Ukraine will cause serious unrest among [Germany’s] allies and among its own population.”

For once, both Russia and Ukraine found themselves on the same page – they both refuted the theory that a couple of intrepid Ukrainian divers carried off the sabotage operation. Surprisingly, they were joined by The Wall Street Journal, which went a step further and implicated Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s former commander in chief, in the explosions. According to WSJ, when the CIA found out about Ukraine’s plan to blow up the pipelines, it called on Zelensky to call off the operation. But Zaluzhny apparently disobeyed the supreme commander in chief and went ahead with the sabotage anyway. Zaluzhny, who now enjoys diplomatic immunity as Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, naturally called the allegations “a provocation.” For his part, military expert Aleksei Leonkov says that most likely, Ukraine was used as a cover in the story, and that only American and British specials services had the means to carry off such a sophisticated caper. But flimsy as it may seem, Germany’s findings serve to preserve the unspoken contract to its people, to allies and to Ukraine.

Of course, some tacit agreements are meant to be broken, as this week’s slowdowns with YouTube in Russia demonstrate. Russia’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor initially tried to blame the problem on Google’s equipment, but eventually admitted that it was intentionally slowing down the video hosting site’s speeds. According to Kommersant, irate users even started canceling contracts with their service providers because YouTube wouldn’t load properly. As Yabloko’s Sergei Mitrokhin writes in an op-ed, the move to slow down YouTube disrupted the fragile social contract in Russia – i.e., scaling back certain democratic achievements in exchange for cushy consumerist privileges. One of those is “the ability to use the latest gifts of technological progress.” But this ham-fisted move threatens “the collapse of the entire social contract that serves as the foundation of the current system,” he writes. The question is, how long will the audience be willing to swallow what it sees on stage, especially once it runs out of popcorn?