Moscow Times: Putin Signs Off on Sanctioned Tycoons’ Shared Yandex Stake – Reports. “President Vladimir Putin has agreed on the sale of a majority stake in the Russian side of splintered tech giant Yandex to three sanctioned billionaires and the state-owned VTB Bank, the news websites The Bell and Meduza reported Sunday, citing four unnamed sources close to the company.”
Euronews: Russia mulls lifting Twitter ban after Musk reinstates Kremlin account. “Russia is considering lifting its ban on Twitter after the social media network reinstated access to accounts of Russian state agencies. The ban was imposed before Elon Musk took over running Twitter last October. But since Friday, users can once again search the accounts of the Kremlin and Russia’s Foreign Affairs and Defence ministries, among others.”
SecurityWeek: Pre-Deepfake Campaign Targets Putin Critics. “According to a report from Proofpoint, TA499 targets US and European politicians, and leading businessmen and celebrities who have spoken out against Putin’s invasion. The primary purpose is to persuade the victims to take part in phone calls or video chats from which pro-Putin snippets can be elicited and published – thereby discrediting any previous anti-Putin comments.”
Daily Beast: Russia’s Google, Yandex, Fixes Results So ‘Bald F*cker’ and ‘Bunker Grandad’ Reportedly Won’t Show Putin. “Russia’s biggest search engine secretly put blocks in its code to stop images of Vladimir Putin showing up in the results of potentially embarrassing searches, according to a report, with Nazi iconography also allegedly scrubbed out of the results of queries for the ‘Z’ symbol signifying support for the war in Ukraine.” Headline censored by me so this has half a chance to get to you.
The Guardian: Russian palaces, villas and yachts linked to Putin by email leak – in pictures, maps and video. “An investigation by the the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the news website Meduza has identified a group of 86 apparently unconnected companies or not for profit organisations that appear to hold over $4.5bn (£3.7bn) of assets where a common private email address, LLCInvest.ru, appears to be in use.”
Reuters: Putin Promises to Bolster Russia’s IT Security in Face of Cyber Attacks. “President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that the number of cyber attacks on Russia by foreign ‘state structures’ had increased several times over and that Russia must bolster its cyber defences by reducing the use of foreign software and hardware.”
1945: Putin’s Dream Of Rebuilding The Russian Empire Died In Ukraine. “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine accomplished exactly the opposite Moscow had intended. It strengthened Ukrainian identity, consolidated NATO, unified the EU, and united all democracies worldwide to stand up to Russian aggression. The international community must use all the tools at its disposal to defend Ukraine, strengthen European democracies and liberate Russian citizens from Putin’s brutal and oppressive regime.”
The Irish Times: Pandora Papers: New release reveals more than 800 Russians behind secret companies. “The data includes newly discovered details about companies tied to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s allies and other Russian political figures who shelter assets behind opaque businesses that can also be used to escape global sanctions. The database now contains information on more than 800,000 offshore companies, foundations and trusts, and links to people and companies in more than 200 countries and territories, which can be publicly searched and downloaded.”
BBC: Putin’s mysterious Facebook ‘superfans’ on a mission. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been widely condemned in many parts of the world, but a network of Facebook groups run by people with obscure motivations would like to change perceptions of the country’s leader.”
The Conversation: Putin’s war on history is another form of domestic repression. “Although Putin’s historical revisionism has been most intense around issues surrounding the Second World War and the supposed historical justification for ‘reunion’ with Ukraine, it has also had a profound effect on another aspect of Russian history that hasn’t received as much attention — the study of Stalinist repression in the Soviet Union.”
Salon: Vladimir Putin is losing the war — at least on social media. Here’s why that matters. “In the end, future historians may well label this the first ‘social media war,’ just as Vietnam was the first televised war and the Gulf War of 1991 was the first cable news war. And as Vladimir Putin’s ‘chosen war’ against Ukraine enters its third week, fear and outrage continue to spread across the globe like gangrene. It’s increasingly apparent that social media is driving the coverage and providing key information.”
The Guardian: Social media turn on Putin, the past master. “In Russia on Friday, Vladimir Putin, a man who is now scared of his own shadow, took the extraordinary step of attempting to outlaw information. He banned Facebook. He shut down Twitter. He passed a new law that declares journalism a criminal offence: any journalist found to have published ‘fake news’ on the war in Ukraine now faces up to 15 years in prison. It is, like so many things in the last week, incredible, unprecedented, horrifying – but more importantly it’s also desperate and absurd.”
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: ICIJ releases the Russia Archive, an inside look at how elites close to Putin hide wealth offshore . “Using tens of millions of leaked files, ICIJ reveals the hidden wealth and financial secrets of Russia’s most powerful people, including oligarchs, political leaders, and proxies close to Vladimir Putin.”
Daily Beast: Putin’s Henchmen Rage About Getting Trolled With ‘Endless Photos’ of Dead Russian Troops. “While Russian President Vladimir Putin is raining bombs on Ukrainian cities, his top propagandists are most concerned about getting bombarded with text messages and losing the information war to Ukraine. On Thursday’s episode of The Evening With Vladimir Soloviev, state TV propagandist Vladimir Soloviev complained that he and editor-in-chief of RT Margarita Simonyan are being terrorized by unknown individuals, receiving endless calls and texts about Russia’s military activities in Ukraine. He griped: ‘Margarita and I can show our telephones to demonstrate that we’re getting a thousand calls and texts per hour.’”
Associated Press: Putin tests experimental nasal vaccine against COVID-19. “President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday he has taken an experimental nasal vaccine against the coronavirus, three days after he received his booster shot. Russia is facing its worst surge of infections and deaths since the pandemic began and is struggling to overcome widespread vaccine hesitancy.”
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