- By Mike Eckel
Yavlinsky's Latest Campaign Video Takes On...
...mortgage rates, with a subtle dig against Navalny and his “duck” supporters.
Putin singled out mortgage lending as a point of pride in his recent state-of-the-nation address, saying only 4,000 mortgages were issued in 2001 and nearly a million last year (at under 10 percent on ruble-denominated mortgages, on average, for the first time ever), but also saying they need to "become accessible to the majority of Russian families, working people and young professionals."
- By Mike Eckel
As Election Аpproaches, Аpathy Question At The Fore
The real question about the March 18 election is not who will win but how many voters will turn out. There already is ample anecdotal evidence pointing to voter apathy about an election regarded by many, inside and outside Russia, as scripted.
Elena Solovyova, a journalist for a news and opinion website in the northern Komi region, writes that in her region the apathy is readily apparent: “There is a risk that the symbolic majority is going to lose faith in the president, and if the time comes when there is a need to relieve the president of his legitimacy, his election campaign will be a good place to start looking for evidence."
More On Petersburg Snow Protest
As we reported earlier today (below), a group of youths in St. Petersburg got hauled in by the police this weekend for writing the words "Against Putin" in the snow on one of the city's frozen waterways.
Although the authorities held the youths for hours, they were unable to come up with a law that they had violated and were forced to send them away without charges.
Now, however, Roskomnadzor state media watchdog is demanding that media take down images of the slogan, saying that otherwise they would face charges of illegal campaigning. Although the authorities oppose the image of the words "Against Putin," they have not complained about the use of the phrase in the accompanying articles.
Federation Council Warns Of Foreign Interference
The Federation Council's Commission on Countering Foreign Interference in the Affairs of the Russian Federation has issued a report claiming that the campaign to boycott the March 18 presidential election is being financed from abroad.
"The commission has received information from reliable sources about an increase in the flow of outside money to support those who have come to be called the nonsystem opposition, including Russian supporters of the tactic of 'boycotting the election,' which is being propagandized by foreign propaganda sources," the report claims, according to Interfax.
The report emphasizes that in some cases the "target of influence" may not even realize he or she is being manipulated and that the "foreign curators" may not even be in contact with them.
The reports lists several forms of alleged foreign attempts to influence Russian domestic events, including "the attack on Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia by the regime of [Mikheil] Saakashvili in 2008 to the imposition of one-sided and illegal economic measures (which began long before the officially declaration of Russian sanctions by the United States and the European Union under the pretext of the 2014 Ukrainian political crisis)."
Sobchak Denounces Stalin
Journalist and presidential candidate Ksenya Sobchak has released a video to mark the 65th anniversary of the death of Josef Stalin in which she expresses bewilderment that six of the eight people running for president in Russia this year praise the dictator.
The clip is slickly produced and filmed in Moscow's GULAG museum, where Sobchak walks among torture devices and ominous portraits of Stalin as she denounces him. Sobchak says Stalin is a "dark stain" on Russian history and the only way to "get rid of him is by speaking the truth."
She calls for the removal of Stalin's grave from Red Square and for a law equating glorifying him with justifying Nazism. She says that politicians who praise Stalin as an "excellent manager" should be forced to work as tour guides in the GULAG museum rather than leading the country into the future.
Our Current Time TV colleagues have an extended profile of Zhirinovsky supporters in St. Petersburg.
Death And Voting
Polling station No. 2176 in the Moscow Oblast village of Kurovskoye will be located in the local funeral home, which at least one commentator on social media described as "highly symbolic."
Not A Crime
Several youths in St. Petersburg reportedly wrote the words "Against Putin" in the snow overnight this weekend on top of one of the city's frozen waterways.
An alert and obedient passerby summoned the police, and in less than five minutes a patrol car had rolled up to the scene of crime, according to blogger Andrei Shipilov. The alert officers were apparently so quick to the scene that they managed to nab the miscreants on the spot, snapping the cuffs on them and hauling them down to police precinct No. 78.
In the meantime, a firetruck rushed to the scene and used hoses to wash the offending words away. "In all, [the words] were only there for 15 minutes," Shipilov wrote.
But at the police station, a problem arose.
A representative of the Federal Security Service (FSB) was summoned. Someone came from the Interior Ministry's antiterrorism center. But it turns out, they couldn't think of anything with which to charge the youths; walking around in the snow is not illegal yet in Russia. It turns out that saying "against Putin" is not a crime -- it isn't even an insult.
Law enforcement reportedly kept the perps in handcuffs at the station through the entire night while they mulled the poser, but in the end they were released without any charges filed.
"It will be interesting to see how quickly they update the Criminal Code with this missing statute," Shipilov mused on his blog.