“Heightened Scrutiny”: T-Platforms and the Russian Tech Industry’s Dismal Future

The bankruptcy of T-Platforms, once the undisputed leader in Russian supercomputers, wrapped early this past October. The tale of its liquidation and the ruination of its founder, Vsevolod Opanasenko, encapsulates the double-bind confronting Russian tech entrepreneurs today: choose to keep a low profile and never realize your full commercial potential or grow big with government funding on terms that leave you vulnerable to abuse from unscrupulous competitors working with corrupt law enforcement. The history of T-Platforms’ folding illustrates that very real dangers these entrepreneurs face when deciding whether to accept the support of the Russian state.

The circumstances behind T-Platforms’ bankruptcy and Opanasenko’s fall from grace suggest that the prevailing Putinist political economy , which tolerates predation on private business by state officials and private citizens alike in return for political fealty, may undermine the Kremlin’s efforts to attain “digital sovereignty“. The bureaucratic rapacity evidenced in the T-Platforms saga will metastasize: the more resources the Kremlin allocates to maintaining a neglected domestic microelectronics sector beset by punitive US and allied export controls, the greater the feeding frenzy for access to those resources among interested parties both within and without the Russian state. Tech entrepreneurs caught up in this frenzy run a worryingly fair chance of ending up behind bars.

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T-Platforms’ story is in many ways the story of its founder, Opanasenko, who began his career under the tutelage of physicist and senior Soviet Academy of Sciences principal Yevgeny Velikhov (perhaps best known as being the man who first brought Japanese computers to the Soviet Union). A perestroika wunderkind, Opanasenko claimed in one undated interview to have received a tape player and a medal from the Soviet government for helping make a graphics library for Japanese video game company Konami.

Opanasenko subsequently studied at the K.E. Tsiolkovsky Russian State Technological University, where he had a profitable side-hustle in the form of a PC import business he named Micronic. So successful was Micronic that by the early 2000s it had managed to buy an entire PC peripherals factory in China. Nonetheless, pricing wars between Micronic and competing peripherals importers made it a less than profitable enterprise. Opanasenko sold off the Chinese plant in 2002 to focus on the supercomputer sector, the competition in Russia for that market being negligible and the profit margins considerable.

Opanasenko parlayed the proceeds from the 2002 sale of Micronic’s Chinese factory to set up T-Platforms that same year. His timing could not have been more perfect, as rising prices over the next decade gradually eased the trauma of Russia’s 1998 financial crisis and stimulated demand among Russian universities and firms for access to supercomputers’ potential to generate unique scientific insights and unlock hitherto hidden business opportunities (which are of course not necessarily mutually exclusive).

T-Platforms first struck big as a participant in “Supercomputer Initiative Feniks” or SKIF, а joint Russo-Belarusian program aimed at providing universities and research in those countries with access to supercomputing platforms. With backing from the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade (Minpromtorg) and the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, T-Platforms developed the SKIF-1000 supercomputer for a cool $2 million. Opanasenko’s company subsequently built on this success by developing a series of turnkey supercomputers for various Russian universities throughout the 2000s.

T-Platforms scored again in November 2009 with the rollout of the “Lomonosov” supercomputer, which the company developed for use by Moscow State University (MGU). MGU loaned the Lomonosov’s computing power to everyone from pharmaceutical researchers to boffins seeking models capable of forecasting Russia’s socioeconomic development over the next five decades. Such was T-Platforms’ success and appeal that in October 2010 Vneshekonombank obtained a 10% stake in the company, which Opanasenko said would help T-Platforms become a contender in the global supercomputing arena.

By 2012, T-Platforms had launched a chip design business under the name Baikal Electronics, had already managed to secure more than 200 international patents and was opening offices in Hong Kong, Hannover, and Palo Alto – the heart of America’s Silicon Valley. Opanasenko described these ventures to Ъ as being akin to “stepping into the domain of monsters’ – namely, more developed, established software and computer companies in Europe, the United States, and East Asia. Little did Opanasenko realize that other, more immediate concerns awaited him closer to home.

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T-Platforms’ downfall began, ironically, with a success: a November 2016 contract to supply Russia’s Interior Ministry (MVD) with computers containing a new chip design by the company’s chip design arm, Baikal Electronics, which had by then attracted VEB and state tech incubator Rosnano as investors. Awarded for RUB 357 million, the contract required T-Platforms (there were no other bidders) to supply 9,348 computers containing Baikal Electronics’ new Baikal T-1 microprocessor for use in MVD-run driver license tests.

The deal proved a disaster. The Nevember 2016 contract required T-Platforms to deliver the 9,348 computers to the MVD by no later than 1 July 2017. The company ended up sourcing just 1,837 computers and, to make matters worse, delivered those units nearly a month after the 1 July deadline. The MVD refused delivery and T-Platforms filed suit to extract payment. T-Platforms asserted that the deal fell through because the MVD withheld advance payment and necessary information, but the claim went nowhere in court.

Weighing in on the matter, Russia’s Federal Anti-monopoly Service (FAS) rejected T-Platforms’ argument that MVD had tanked the contract and started investigating the November 2016 deal along with a separate supercomputer contract awarded to T-Platforms by Rosatom’s Kurchatov Institute. One anonymous Vedomosti IT industry source offered that T-Platforms had been greedy because it had not solicited certain unspecified partners to help implement the contract. Others noted that Russian state customers seldom revise delivery timelines while Russian law enforcement tracks contractual delays closely, a legal liability nightmare replete with potential for civil litigation, if not criminal prosecution.

Although Vedomosti‘s IT industry sources generally agreed that T-Platforms shouldered much of the blame for the contract’s failure, they also concurred that Russia’s federal procurement system exposed contractors to considerable pressure from regulators and federal law enforcement. Public procurement contracts of course merit close monitoring, not least given that the funds disbursed under such contracts ultimately come from the public’s purse. Routine monitoring crosses a line, however, when state monitors fabricate legal and regulatory against companies on behalf of private patrons interested in seizing those companies’ assets. The available evidence, though circumstantial, indicates Opanasenko and T-Platforms might have fallen victim to just such a scenario.

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The troubles began in October 2017, when agents with FSB’s M Directorate arrested Andrey Nechaev. According to Ъ, Russia’s Investigative Committee (SK) had taken an interest in certain contracts that Nechaev had approved in his capacity as one of MVD’s lead IT engineers. The FSB reportedly broadcast quite literally Nechaev on the sidelines of a flashy Moscow tech expo, a spectacle that was picked up by Russian state media – a possible sign of the weight assigned to the unfolding case.

Matters escalated decisively on March 27, 2019, when a Moscow court jailed Opanasenko and the then-head of the MVD’s IT department, Alexander Alexandrov. SK reportedly arrested both men on criminal abuse of power charges in connection to the November 2016 driver’s test computer contract. In February 2020, the investigative agency added two fraud charges against Opanasenko on the grounds that he and Baikal Electronics – T-Platforms’ chip design affiliate – had defrauded MVD by delivering computers with subpar processors.

Opanasenko found a prominent advocate early on in Anatoly Chubais, the head of Baikal investor Rosnano. Speaking to Forbes Russia in October 2019, Chubais hailed Opanasenko as one of Russia’s most important innovators and decried his jailing as “a crude violation of the law”. Chubais, who left Russia over Putin’s escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, is currently under investigation in connection to his tenure as Rosnano chief between 2010 and 2020, during which time the company allegedly accumulated upwards of $3.5 billion in debt. Boris Titov, Putin’s entrepreneur rights tsar, was another of Opanasenko’s supporters. In a December 2020 interview with Vedomosti, Titov maintained that the MVD had mishandled the November 2016 deal and thus compromised – maybe deliberately – T-Platforms’ ability to fulfill its contractual obligations.

T-Platforms’ troubles did not end with Opanasenko’s March 2019 arrest, however, as Russia’s Federal Tax Service (FNS) and several business partners also filed involuntary bankruptcy claims against the company. By December 2019, T-Platforms had lost up to 80% its employees, prompting its press service to decry VEB’s lack of support for the company in the wake of Opanasenko’s jailing. That same month, Vedomosti reported that the Russian government was considering transferring control of T-Platforms to VEB subsidiary NM-Tekh – the very same company that employed Frolov as a general director.

Titov and Chubais stopped short of identifying the person or persons they thought might be responsible for T-Platforms’ and Opanasenko’s legal woes. Insofar as there exists any one person who might have had a stake in Opanasenko’s prosecution, Denis Frolov appears to be the most likely candidate. In late October 2020, Ъ reported that Varton, the CEO of LED light manufacturer Varton, was in talks to purchase a 60% stake in Baikal Electronics. How exactly Frolov and Varton planned to finance the estimated RUB 4 billion transaction was never clear.

VEB – by now аn backer both of T-Platforms and Baikal Electronics – may have positioned Frolov to negotiating this deal on VEB’s behalf. Frolov wore many hats outside of his work for Varton, the most remarkable being his role as the general director of VEB subsidiary NM-Tekh. Varton successfully negotiated a 70% stake in Baikal Electronics in late June 2021. Sources interviewed by Ъ estimated the chip designer’s worth at around RUB 3-6 billion – a valuation, the business paper noted, that was largely reflective of increased demand for import substitution in the microelectronics sector.

These details, while sketchy, show that Frolov, a person affiliated with VEB, took advantage of T-Platforms’ and Opanasenko’s legal troubles to buy a majority stake in Baikal Electronics. This arrangement notionally benefited VEB by placing in charge of Baikal Electronics a known quantity who could help VEB access whatever subsidies the Kremlin might extend to the chip designer. But this is admittedly only a theory.

What is not a theory is that SK agents searched Frolov’s home and brought him in for questioning the following October. Frolov’s attorney claimed that SK had interviewed his client as a witness in an investigation into a separate matter involving a scheme to bribe police into prosecuting Alexander Kalinin, the president of Russian IT giant National Computer Corporation (NKK). Here it’s worth noting that NKK appointed Frolov to Kalinin’s post not long before Varton gained its majority holding in Baikal Electronics. A more thorough accounting of Frolov’s dealings with NKK and Kalinin is, regrettably, beyond the scope of the present summary.

Some commentators, such as The Moscow Post, have obliquely hinted that Frolov’s activities vis-a-vis Baikal Electronics evidenced a Machiavellian contest for control of the Russian microelectronics industry between VEB chief and former deputy PM Igor Shuvalov, on the one side, and Rostec chief Sergey Chemezov and his supposed protégé, Minpromtorg head Denis Manturov, on the other. Such claims are difficult to substantiate – not least given The Moscow Post’s proclivity for running scurrilous rumors about the Kremlin’s liberal technocrat camp – are not wholly implausible. Putin’s subordinates have, after all, waged turf wars over less (see the Three Whales scandal).

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Т-Platforms’ prospects were revived briefly in November 2020 when FNS withdrew its involuntary bankruptcy complaint against the company. It even brought on a new general director and embarked on a hiring spree in anticipation of “returning to the market”. No such return ever materialized, however, as several other private creditors continued to push for T-Platforms’ liquidation. Matters finally came to a head in October 2021, when T-Platforms itself filed for voluntary bankruptcy after Minpromtorg filed a claim against the company for RUB 2.76 billion.

Opanasenko was finally freed in January 2022, by which time he had spent 34 months behind bars and under house arrest. In March 2022, CNews.ru, citing anonymous sources, reported that Rostec had hired Opanasenko to “high position”, though none of them agreed on the exact details of his appointment. Yet Opanasenko suffered another personaly setback when, in August 2022, a court ordered him to pay VEB RUB 1.65 billion in fines. The ruling appears to have pushed Opanasenko to file for bankruptcy the following month. The criminal case against Opanasenko and Alexandrovich, meanwhile, remained open in Moscow’s Meshchanskiy Court City Court as of early this past September. Opanasenko’s fate remains in limbo.

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Russian tech industry analyst Valeriya Brusnikina neatly summarized the issue behind T-Platforms’ undoing in a January 2022 interview with Skillbox.ru. Commenting on public procurement contracts, Brusnikina observed that “state financing is always accompanied by heightened scrutiny from law enforcement structures and core ministries and agencies”. The “heightened scrutiny” that brought down T-Platforms and Opanasenko will continue to suffuse the Russian tech industry with an atmosphere of distrust where no real risks can be taken and thus no rewards reaped. Those tech entrepreneurs who remain in Russia may do well to remember what happened to Opanasenko before accepting support from the federal government. The Kremlin cannot expect to preserve and expend Russia’s productive technological capacity if it does not afford hi-tech ventures some guarantee of protection from predatory state networks and their commercial accomplices.

A Portrait of a Russian Judge [Translation]

Translator’s Note: The following text is an approximate translation of an 18 December 2019 Proekt article by authors Alexander Sokolov and Roman Badanin.

In the autumn of 2019, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Russia, Vyacheslav Lebedev, was appointed to another term. He started off with the big “Moscow Case”, a trial over the participants of peaceful protests against abuses in Moscow elections. As was the case seven years ago, when Lebedev was reappointed amidst of the “Bolotnaya Affair”, Russian courts obediently carry out the will of vlast’: when necessary, they severely punish members of the opposition; when asked, they demonstrate a strange leniency.

It is the middle of the naughts. The young chief judge, who is now a retiree and wishes to remain anonymous, attended his first meeting of the Council of Judges — one of the highest organs of judicial authority in the country. Usually convening twice a year, the gathering generally consists of an official portion, with speeches and awards, along an unofficial portion consisting of a party with drinks and snacks. Recalls the former chief judge: “I was shocked when I witnessed the plastered head of a regional court crawl on all fours and, like a dog, grasped onto the legs of Lebedev’s trousers”.

The chief justice of the Supreme Court has commanded Russia’s jurisprudence for 30 years.  During this time, four presidents and two Constitutions have changed. Yet the work of the highest judge in the land has remained the same.

Vyacheslav Lebedev was born in 1943. His career developed in a manner typical of many Soviet judges. At 17 years old, he went to work at the Moscow Reinforced Concrete Pipe Factory, during which time he studied law during the evenings at Moscow State University. Lebedev finished his studies in 1968: two years later, at the age of 27, he was selected to serve as a People’s Judge on the Leningrad District Court in Moscow. Several years later, he headed Moscow’s Zheleznodorozhniy District Court, where he served as chief judge until 1984.

His career within the justice system advanced swiftly. In 1984 Lebedev was nominated as the deputy chief judge of the Moscow City Court (Mosgorsud), rising to the post of chief judge just two years later. Three years after that, Lebedev found himself at the helm of the main judicial organ of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

At the start of the 1990s, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev offered Lebedev the post of Prosecutor General of the USSR. However, Lebedev declined, explaining: “I’m a judge, not a prosecutor”. In 1993, Lebedev joined the Commission for the Development of the Constitution.

As a youth Lebedev practiced boxing. But the judge is no stranger to art – he loves the theater and jazz, especially the saxophone, and even plays the instrument, according to one former chief judge. There’s even a rumor among lawyers that Mels, the hero of Valeriy Todorovsky’s 2008 film Hipsters, is based on Lebedev; like the chief justice, Mels hails from a simple working family, studies at a university, is a sportsman, listens to jazz, and plays the saxophone.

Family

“You hand out illegal and baseless verdicts! You crudely violate the law, and I don’t trust you!”, shouted Viktor Milyekhin, failed candidate for the post of chief justice of the Supreme Court, to the Higher Qualification Collegium of Judges. The former banker, having previously been subjected to criminal prosecution, was now a lawyer and, either in earnest or in jest, had taken aim at the head of Russia’s entire court system. However, due to bad health, Milyekhin did not come to the meeting of the qualification board, and he did not receive a second chance.

Milyekhin was the sole challenger to Lebedev in the last elections. The frivolous nature of his candidacy only underscores the lack of alternatives to Lebedev, who has occupied his post through eight consecutive terms on account of technical reappointments. “Everything’s clear to everyone. It’s shameful to be a clown — who needs it?”, asks well-known attorney Roman Bevzenko. Several years ago, Bevzenko himself tried to become a Supreme Court justice but was removed from the running because Lebedev disliked his candidacy.

At 76 years of age, Lebedev holds three records: he is the oldest judicial chief; the oldest active judge; and the longest-serving head of any Russian court. Still, in 2012, the president signed a law that removed age limits for judges, enabling Lebedev to remain on his own throne for life.

According to a judge familiar with the couple, Lebedev’s wife Tatyana is a relative of a now-deceased Politburo member. Sources attribute Lebedev’s rapid rise during the 1980s to his fortunate marriage. The Lebedevs have lived in an elite Soviet-era dacha community outside Arkhangelsk since the 1990s, says a former judge who regularly visited the couple there. Proekt discovered that other members of the judiciary also own dachas in the same settlement, including the chairman of the Constitutional Court of Russia, Valeriy Zorkin. Levbdev’s niece – his daughter’s daughter – followed in her grandfather’s footsteps and served with the Russian Supreme Arbitration Court, but providently removed herself before the latter institution merged with the Supreme Court in 2014.

Power

“This was not a unification, but a liquidation,” recalls Roman Bevzenko, the former head of the Supreme Arbitration Court’s private law division. Putin came up with the idea of combining the Supreme Arbitration Court and the Supreme Court into a single entity at the start of the 2000s, continues Bevzenko; then-head of the presidential administration, Dmitri Medvedev, also supported the idea. One former Constitutional Court judge quoted him as saying, “We don’t need this three-headed entity […] We need a single Supreme Court, like in the United States”. A relevant bill was written and tabled before the start of Putin’s third term.

“I propose unifying the Supreme Court and the Supreme Arbitration Court, for which it will be necessary to introduce amendments to the Constitution”, explained President Putin at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2013.

“Everyone expected that this would amount to a smooth merger of the judicial corpus, but when the first bills appeared, everyone was startled,” recalls Bevzenko. The new legislation required all judges to pass through a sieve of qualification boards and presidential administration officials. Most managed to slip past the first stage, but the real problems began with the Presidential Commission on Personnel. Bevzenko describes the latter as being awash with poison pen letters, FSB dossiers, denunciations, and tight-lipped officials. As result only 17 of the 36 candidates from the Supreme Arbitration Court ended up becoming Supreme Court judges.

Some judges were removed for opposing the Supreme Court and defending unpopular judges in the High Disciplinary Judicial Board (HDJB). The latter organ, which was designed to handle complaints against judges, was chaired by six justices – three from the Supreme Court and three from the Supreme Arbitration Court. If there was parity among these six judges, then a judge who had faced criticism would not be stripped of his or her powers. Bevzenko recalls that the HDJB heard many cases about judges who had been baselessly “forced out” for adopting unwelcome rulings. The Supreme Arbitration Court’s representatives on the HDJB often protested against depriving such judges of their status and saved the latter from losing their office.

Concludes Bevzenko, “I think that he [Lebedev] simply wanted to bring the Economic Collegium (Note: the Economic Collegium is the branch of the Supreme Court that assumed the functions of the Supreme Arbitration Court after the latter’s dissolution) under his exclusive control so that he could say, ‘this needs to be done’, and people would act accordingly”.

“Lebedev’s principal motive was to have a vertical hierarchy that was clearly subordinate to him,” says a retired judge personally familiar with Lebedev. Thus, the leader of the Supreme Court spends a great deal of time dealing with matters of staffing. Of particular importance to Lebedev are chief judges, explains former Moscow City Judge Sergey Pashin. Pashin was twice threatened with dismissal for his independence and eventually resigned of his own accord in 2001. He later wanted to become a justice on the Supreme Court, but was rejected.

Lebedev’s former secretary and assistant, Alexei Kharlamov, is a typical protégé. Upon leaving Lebedev’s staff, Kharlamov immediately became a Supreme Court justice. By 2018, Kharlamov, who was then just over forty years old, had already taken the throne as head of the second-most important regional court in the country – the Moscow Oblast Court.

Lebedev looks after his own people, and by that same token, he does not care for those who were appointed against his will, says a retired senior judge familiar with Lebedev.

Lebedev’s control over his own personnel has reached the point where the video cameras inside the Supreme Court surveil his staff, capturing the interactions among judges and court employees. One retired senior judge says that Lebedev sometimes questions his staff after viewing such recordings.

The Kuban

Lebedev sources much of his personnel from Russia’s Kuban region. The Chief Justice maintains a special relationship with Krasnodar Krai. One former judge who worked alongside him says the Lebedev has vacationed there since Soviet times and fell in love with the region years ago. Since the local mindset is characterized by hospitality, the residents of the Kuban always strive to welcome him; as a result, Lebedev has informal ties to a number of natives of the region.

Lebedev’s Kuban protégés have occupied high judicial posts in the Russian capital for many years. One such person is Viktor Momotov. Momotov worked at the Kuban State University for more than 20 years, and never once donned a judge’s robes until 2010, when he suddenly became a justice of the Supreme Court. Now he also serves as the chairman and the plenum secretary of the Supreme Court.

Lebedev’s friend Vasiliy Voloshin worked in the Krasnador court system for 20 years and recently was promoted to the head of the Third Court of Cassation, which was created as a court of instance between regional courts and the Supreme Court. Another judge close to Lebedev, Vasiliy Tarasov, worked in the Tuapse procurator’s office for five years, then led the Tuapse City Court for ten years, and now heads the Voronezh Oblast Court. Lebedev often takes these judges with him on trips abroad.

Anatoliy Bondar, who began his legal career in the famous Krasnador Krai town of Kushchevka (Note: Kushchevka gained national notoriety in 2010 after members of an organized crime group carried out a massacre the local train station) was promoted to high office as the head of the Second Court of Cassation. As soon as this court began operations, it immediately issued personal sanctions against Lebedev’s long-time rival, Mosgorsud chief judge Olga Yegorovaya.

In March 2013, authorities arrested the Kuban entrepreneur and regional United Russia deputy Sergey Zirinov on suspicion of plotting to murder the head of Anapa’s local Cossack community. Described as Anapa’s “master of the night”, Zirinov allegedly set up a gang that murdered businessmen and took over various hot properties in Anapa. Novaya Gazeta reported that Lebedev had stayed in a hotel owned by Zirinov during his summer vacation.

A special personnel committee within the presidential administration investigated this incident and confirmed that Lebedev had vacationed at Zirinov’s “Golden Bay” resort, according to one retired senior judge. This same source asserted that the then-chief of the Krasnodar Krai Court, Aleksander Chernov, coordinated Lebedev’s visit to the resort, adding that Lebedev himself was probably not close to Zirinov.

Chernov, who presided over the Kuban judiciary for almost a quarter of a decade, is another member of Lebedev’s cohort, says former judge Dmitriy Novikov. However, scandals surrounding his relative, the “Golden Judge” Yelena Khakhalevaya – her son, who is married to Chernov’s granddaughter, has been accused of criminal corruption by pro-Kremlin media – have seriously weakened Chernov’s standing. Thus, Lebedev was unable to promote Chernov to the post of head of the Fourth Court of Cassation in 2018; his candidacy was killed in the Kremlin.

Lebedev’s ties to the Kuban were widely discussed by another (now-former) confidant of his, Sochi judge Dmitriy Novikov. In 2010, Novikov was arrested and prosecuted for fraud and judicial misconduct. Novikov, in turn, claimed that the true cause of the case against him was his conflict with Chernov, accusing him and several other senior Krasnodar judges of corruption along. Novikov’s opponents maintained that the counter-accusations were a means of defense and emerged after the criminal case was initiated. The conflict was decided in a mutually satisfactory in 2011, with Novikov being released from prison and regaining his status as a judge, while Chernov remained in his own post until 2019

Although Novikov initially refrained from criticizing his old acquaintance, he still remained angry with Lebedev. The former judge started a video blog: now that the case against him is over and he has been freed from punishment, Novikov posts content in which he not only accuses Lebedev of corruption (asserting, for example, that Lebedev flew to Zirinov on a plane onto which he had allegedly loaded USD 300,000) but also complains about Sochi judges are “shaken down” and made to pay for Lebedev’s banquets.

Just

In November 2007, FSB officers arrested Deputy Finance Minister Sergey Storchak on charges of attempted fraud. The case was never closed, as Storchak was released the following year due to a lack of evidence against him. However, while he was sitting in jail, an intense battle raged for his fate, as Putin’s old confidant, Aleksei Kudrin, appealed to the president on Storchak’s behalf. Media sources reported that Kudrin, being Storchak’s boss, was the main target under attack and that the FSB and the Investigative Committee defended their decision to open the investigation.

This was one instance where the president needed Lebedev. Putin was interested in Lebedev’s opinion “as an arbiter unaffiliated with either side”, recalls a high-ranking acquaintance of the chief justice. According to him, Lebedev’s opinion led to Storchak’s release roughly one year after his arrest. “He regularly meets with Putin, who asks for his opinion regarding big issues” – that is, when the interests of various groups within the president’s orbit collide in court. When asked about Lebedev’s role in freeing Storchak, Alexei Kudrin’s press secretary responded: “We know nothing of this practice”. The president’s press secretary, Dmitri Peskov, answered with, “No comment”.

In order to understand the kind of cases in which Lebedev would have intervened, one former court director suggests paying attention to prominent rulings that run counter to established procedural processes. One example is the case of Yevgeniya Vasilyevaya, the lover of ex-defense minister Anatoliy Serdyukov, who at the time of the scandal was the father-in-law of Viktor Zubkov. Zubkov himself was a Putin confidante from the president’s days in St. Petersburg. Vasiliyevaya was placed under house arrest for thieving billions of rubles – such kindness is untypical of courts of common jurisdiction. In 2012, when the case was heard, one was 72 times more like to end up behind bars than under house arrest, according to data compiled by the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court.

Another example is the case of high-ranking detective Dmitriy Dovgiy, who was thought to have been too independent and sparred with his own boss, Putin’s classmate Aleksandr Bastrykin, for which Dovgiy was accused of bribery and sent to prison. The fact of the bribe was corroborated solely by witness testimony; the money itself never materialized. But this didn’t hamper the court from contravening part 4 of Article 302 of the Russian Criminal Code, which requires that guilty verdicts be handed down only on the basis of incontrovertible evidence, and not on the assumption of the investigator’s guilt.

“Lebedev subscribes to the belief that judges are a part of the law enforcement system”, says a retired senior judge. As a result, Lebedev’s system of justice generally issues verdicts that favor the bureaucracy, while in economic cases the Supreme Court takes a “pro-budget position”. This is corroborated by statistics: since 2014, courts have become 19% less likely to make state organs answer for damages, conversely becoming 14% more likely to replenish the treasury with decisions that favor the tax service and other state organs.

The Supreme Court itself is also changing. Over the past five years, the already-low chances of securing a review of a verdict by the high judicial body have fallen two-fold. In 2013, the Supreme Court admitted and reviewed 1 out of every 130 appeals in criminal cases; today, only 1 out of every 340 appeals come across its docket.

The repressive tendency of the Lebedev system assumes tangible form in criminal proceedings. The trial of the serial killer Andrei Chikatilo 1992 marked the first notable case in post-Soviet Russia where the judges and all the participants in the judicial process where a defendant was placed in a cage for trial. Since then, these cages have been installed everywhere, such that all criminal defendants have seemingly been equated with Chikatilo. This is done ostensibly for the security of the judges, although the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has deemed the practice to be a human rights violation on multiple occasions.

  “For any practicing attorney to say, ‘Let’s go to the general jurisdiction court’— it’s akin to offering to descend into pitch darkness,” opines Bevzenko.

By 2018, Russia had reached a historical minimum of acquittals in criminal cases. As has been previously calculated, whereas jury trials acquit roughly 28% of those sitting opposite the prosecution, district general jurisdiction courts only release 3.6%. Moreover, if a person was previously jailed, the chances of release fall to 0.4%. “The justice system today is a ministry for the production of prisoners for labor camps”, agrees the ex-judge Pashin, who now works as a professor with the judiciary department of the Higher School of Economics.

“Special judges” often conduct politically-charged cases where the authorities are interested in the necessary judgments. During his time as a judge during the 1980s, Lebedev himself presided over such cases. In 1984, he handed down a guilty verdict against the Soviet human rights activist Elena Sannikova. In January 1986, not long after being appointed as the chief justice of the Moscow City Court, Lebedev sentenced dissident Felix Svetov to five years of internal exile for defaming the Soviet system.

Honest

On a warm winter day in January 2019, an Ilyushin Il-96 passenger airplane touched down at an airport near Asuncion, Paraguay. The plane bore tail number 96019; on its fuselage was inscribed “Rossiya”, denoting the Russian state-owned airline to which the plane belonged. The plane itself specialized in transporting government VIPs and had flown from Russian across Senegal. International media reported that the plane was carrying a contingent of armed Russian mercenaries to Venezuela for the defense of President Nicolas Maduro.

Аlso onboard the plane was Lebedev, who had decided to visit Paraguay and Cuba for the purpose of strengthening judicial ties between those countries and Russia.

Plane number 96019 services Lebedev in many of his travels: the aircraft frequently lands at his favorite resort, Sochi, though last year it visited Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

The issue of providing the plane to Lebedev was settled sometime in 2011 or 2012, assets an ex-employee of the judicial apparatus. “He asked the president for a long time, especially after the general jurisdiction courts handed down the necessary verdicts following those massive protests”. Moscow’s judges declined all complaints regarding electoral fraud, but when the police arrested hundreds of people in the wake of the aforementioned protests, they began to hand down real prison terms for the so-called “Balotnaya affair”. The ECHR later deemed these sentences to be illegal.

Besides aviation services, security, and his official dacha in Arkhangelsk, Lebedev possesses still another attribute of the new nomenklatura – namely, valuable personal real estate in the elite district of Podmoskovye. According to his official asset declaration form for 2018, Lebedev owns a 4,100 square meter plot of land and a home with a total area of 583.7 square meters. The only property that matches these parameters is a single dacha in the settlement of Uspenskiye Dachi, which is located near the Moscow suburb of Rublyovka. The current market value of this property is around RUB 127 million (USD 2.08 million), or around RUB 3.1 million (USD 50,802) per 100 square meters of land. Lebedev received the dacha from the state in 2001. One of Lebedev’s neighbors in Uspenskiye Dachi is Prosecutor General Yuriy Chaika; a former high-ranking judge claims that Chaika is the only senior official with whom Lebedev speaks using informal language.

Lebedev also declared owning a 232-square meter apartment. The property is located in a building on Academic Zelinskiy Street in Moscow. President Putin previously owned an apartment in a neighboring facility, claim two sources with access to judicial circles. The president took up residence at 6 Academic Zelinskiy Street after moving from St. Petersburg in the 1990s; this complex was also home to Alexei Kudrin, Anatoly Chubais, and other members of the Putin-era elite.

The former luster of these homes has long since tarnished, and their high-ranking owners hardly visit their apartments anymore. In 2017, residents complained that cracks had appeared in the foundations of the building because of construction taking place next door. Even so, the space at 6 Academic Zelenskiy Street don’t come cheap: the market value of Lebedev’s apartment is approximately RUB 97 million (USD 1.6 million), if the average market price of apartments in neighboring buildings (RUB 420,000 [USD 6,882] per square meter) is any indication.

Lebedev earned RUB 11.4 million (USD 186,822) in 2018, according to his asset declaration form. Naturally, he is one of the top ten highest-paid judges in Russia. However, his salary alone is insufficient to allow him to purchase the combined real estate assets of the Lebedev family at market prices.

Lebedev has owned a number of properties over the past 20 years. In 1999, he became the owner of a 25-acre plot in Barvikha, which he obtained from the Odintsovsky District. A year and a half later he sold this property to a Maxim Moskalev, who in turn transferred it to one Dmitriy Agramakov. Agramakov then sold the plot in 2013 to a Denis Bolotov, who has owned it ever since. Notably, Moskalev and Agramakov were identified as the beneficiaries of multiple banks in the system of “shadow financier” Sergey Magin, who in 2015 was sentenced to serve eight and a half years in a labor colony for conducting illegal financial operations worth nearly RUB 122 billion (approximately USD 2 billion).

The fate of another of Lebedev’s former properties is not less interesting. In September 2002, Lebedev obtained an additional 15 acres of land in Barvikha; the land had become worth USD 2 million by September 2003. The very next day after the one-year anniversary of this transaction, Lebedev transferred ownership of the property to his subordinate, Vladimir Shiryaev, the head of the Supreme Court’s Economic Directorate, according to official cadastral data. Less than two weeks later, this land turned up in the hands of Lidiya Rudenko, the mother-in-law of Odessa criminal boss Valery Tomal. A year and a half passed, and the land came under the control of Toma’s wife Natalya, who remains the owner to this day.

Tomal has previously been investigated by the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, and in 2005 he came to the attention of Spanish police for his suspected involvement in money laundering. He is the co-founder of the Moscow-based OOO ATN-Investstroi, which is currently in liquidation. Tomal’s former business partner in ATN-Investstroi, Yevgeny Oras, previously served as the general director of gulagu.net. This website, which sold prisoners insurance covering torture and violent death, was later prosecuted for large-scale embezzlement.

All of the sources who spoke to Proekt agreed that Lebedev does not seek out luxury especially, and is motivated not by money, but rather seeks control over the system that he has built. “Vyacheslav Mikhailovich is of the old Soviet school”, notes Pashin.

A Scholar

On Sunday, 14 September 2013, an important event took place in Ghana. At the invitation of Ghanaian chief justice Georgina Bush, the leader of the Supreme Court of Russia honored the African country with a four-day visit. Some of Lebedev’s Kuban acquaintances accompanied him on the trip, including the then-head of the Moscow Oblast Court, Vasily Voloshin, and the chair of the Saratov Oblast Court, Vasily Tarasov. Local media announced that Lebedev would speak at a gathering of the Ghana Bar Association in the regional capital of Ho on 16 September, after which the assembled Ghanaian and Russian judges would sign a memorandum of understanding. Not addressed was what the judges planned to do over the ensuing weekend.

Russian media paid no attention to this event at the time, as is evidenced by contemporary Google and Yandex metadata.

The day after his arrival, Ghanaian news reported that Lebedev had been involved in a traffic accident while leaving the conference. According to the official version of the accident, a truck had crashed into the convoy carrying the judge. Lebedev was injured, and EMT personnel spent nearly an hour pulling him from the wreckage. The judge was delivered to the intensive care unit of a military hospital in Accra, where his condition stabilized. On 18 September, Lebedev was flown back to Moscow on an airplane belonging to the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations. Lebedev dislocated his clavicle and sustained bruises to his spine and ribs as a result of the accident.

Lebedev’s visit to Ghana immediately raised many questions. The country’s legal system is essentially different from Russia’s. However, in Ghana there’s a number of beautiful locations where one may hunt elephants and other animals. In recent years, the elephants there have been hunted so intensively that their population has sharply diminished.

It’s possible that Lebedev and his friends were actually interested in a safari since they are avid hunters. Says one retired senior judge familiar with Lebedev: “Lebedev’s been in love with hunting since Soviet times when it was a mark of privilege. He ventured all over Africa and even brought back souvenirs for his colleagues, especially masks”. They would’ve have preferred that their visit to Ghana go unnoticed, continues the former judge, had it not been for the accident and the heavy injuries suffered as a result. The standard elephant safari tour in Africa a decade ago cost USD 80,000 – USD 50,000 for a hunting license and USD 30,000 to organize the hunt itself.

This story, like other ones which paint Lebedev in an unfavorable light, was previously leaked to the press, albeit often in a very distorted form: the issue is that despite the vertical of authority Lebedev has built for himself, he still has opponents who occupy positions of authority inside Russia. The throne upon which the chief justice sits has swayed more than once. At the beginning of the 2000s, there were the reforms of Dmitry Kozak: previously, the head of the Supreme Court had no term limits; after 2001, however, the office of chief justice was to be renewed every six years, thus making the officeholder more dependent on higher authorities.

For insurance, Lebedev swiftly transformed into an “eminent scholar”: in just two years, he defended his graduate and doctoral dissertations. By April 2014, when the Supreme Court absorbed the Supreme Arbitration Court, Lebedev was already saying goodbye to his colleagues. According to former judge close to him, Lebedev doubted to the end that Putin would choose him. But then everything worked out.

“Vyacheslav Mikhailovich is a very cautious man. He never sticks his neck out”. – Former Moscow City Judge Sergey Pashin on Lebedev’s preference for abstaining from politically-risky issues over issuing dangerous judgments.

* * *

“Constant experience shows us that every man who has power is inclined to abuse it; he goes until he finds limits […] There would be an end of everything, were the same man, or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals”. –Montesquieu, as quoted by Lebedev in his monograph, The Formation and Development of Judicial Power in the Russian Federation.

> Allen Maggard

How to Defend Business from Siloviki: Presidental Laws and Expert Advice [Translation]

Translator’s Note: The following text is an approximate translation of an article published by Pravo.ru on 20 April 2018. The original author is Alexei Malakhovskiy.- Allen Maggard

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At the end of 2015, Vladimir Putin, appearing before the Federal Assembly, emphasized that excessive activity by law enforcement organs was disrupting the business climate in Russia. The president noted that only 15% of criminal cases concerning economic offenses in Russia result in sentencing. At the same time, 83% of entrepreneurs subjected to criminal proceedings – an absolute majority – totally or partially lost their business. Said Putin: “That is, they were ‘pressed,’ ‘robbed,’ and released.”

Notaries in the Isolation Unit and Fines instead of Sentences

In order to change this situation and come up with additional guarantees for guaranteeing the rights of businessmen, Putin at the start of 2016 ordered the creation of a working group to monitor and analyze law enforcement practices in the sphere of entrepreneurship. This group included representatives of the presidential administration and security agencies, as well as the heads of four leading business organizations: the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), Delovaya Rossiya, Opora Rossii, and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation. To help businesspeople, the new organ drafted a series of amendments to the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code, which the president signed in the summer of 2016. These amendments included the following measures:

• Handing down fines instead of criminal punishment. Businessmen who commit an economic crime for the first time are freed from criminal punishment if they compensate for damages to the federal budget. The list of formulations whereby such leniency may be extended to entrepreneurs is sufficiently wide and stretches from limiting competition and market manipulation to deliberate or fictitious bankruptcy. The volume of reimbursement will be calculated either at two times the sum of the damage or as two times the sum of the expense incurred as a result of the crime. Previously, such rates were calculated on a fivefold basis.
• Increasing the amount of damage that qualifies as an “economic” crime. The definition of significant damage was increased from RUB 1.5 million to RUB 2.25 million, while especially significant damage was revised from RUB 6 million to RUB 9 million.
• Raising the minimum threshold for initiating a criminal case concerning the non-payment of taxes. The sum of unpaid taxes that would trigger a criminal investigation against an entrepreneur was raised from RUB 2 million to RUB 5 million.
• Allowing notaries to visit entrepreneurs held in isolation units. Arrested businessmen are allowed to invite their notaries to visit them in isolation in order to formalize power of attorney for controlling their business interests. Businessmen are allowed to meet their notaries free of restriction with regards to the duration or frequency thereof.

The next assignment was to develop measures for increasing the liability of security officials for unreasonably persecuting businesses. In the autumn of 2016, experts drafted a corresponding bill, which deputies adopted in December of the same year. The document introduced amendments to Article 299 of the Criminal Codex, which concerns the illegal initiation of criminal cases. The maximum period of imprisonment for individuals found guilty of Article 299 offenses was raised from five years to seven years. Furthermore, the amendments classify the unlawful initiation of criminal cases for the purpose of obstructing entrepreneurial activity and the collapse of business due to criminal persecution initiated by investigators for mercenary purposes or personal interest as aggravating circumstances. The punishment for such offenses on the part of law enforcement was raised from five to ten years’ imprisonment.

At the same time, the Supreme Court also provided significant guidance concerning “economic” crimes. The Supreme Court told investigative organs and courts how to distinguish fraudulent entrepreneurial activity from typical business practice. Besides that, the document defended businesspeople from the requalification of “commercial” crimes as “simple” fraud, a technique that law enforcement has used to deprive businesspeople of various legal guarantees and led investigations to “pressure” entrepreneurs.

The enumerated changes were already paying off by the beginning of 2017. Speaking at the Russian Investment Forum in Sochi in February 2017, Presidential Commissioner for Entrepreneurs’ Rights Boris Titov said that the number of criminal cases in Russia initiated against entrepreneurs was beginning to gradually diminish. He pointed out that the number of people being held in isolation for economic offenses also decreased by 23% during the second half of 2016. Yuriy Chaika also noted a positive tendency for businessmen in January 2017: in his words, the number of persons sentenced for economic crimes in Russia contracted fourfold over the past five years.

A Proposal from the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court furthered the policy of liberalizing criminal legislation regarding economic offenses in the autumn of 2017. The plenum of the Supreme Court developed a draft law to assist businesspeople held in custody without cause for an extended period. The current version of the Criminal Procedural Code generally prohibits such preventative measures for economic crimes. In practice, however, investigators reclassify “entrepreneurial” offenses as “general” offenses so as to bypass this, sometimes with agreement from the courts. In order to prevent such “cunning,” the Supreme Court suggested concretizing the recognition of crimes committed in the sphere of economic activity.

The Supreme Court’s Definition of Economic Crimes: “Crimes in the sphere of economic activity are committed by individual entrepreneurs in connection to their implementation of entrepreneurial activity and/or their control of assets for use in entrepreneurial activity, whether as a managing member exercising control of a commercial organization or in connection to the commercial organization’s implementation of entrepreneurial or other economic activities.” (Link)

The Supreme Court’s bill was also designed to break the tendency of suspected and accused persons being held in isolation for months and years on end without specific cause while investigators do not perform active work on their case. In order to extend the period of detention, investigators not only must specify the motives for doing so but must also detail the concrete investigative actions they want to perform. Law enforcement officers will have to report why they did not implement these actions earlier. The State Duma adopted the abovementioned amendments in the first reading.

However, at the start of 2018, experts asserted that the number of criminal cases initiated against entrepreneurs was still climbing. This is evidenced by statistics collected in the report “Criminal Persecution for Economic Matters-2017,” which was prepared by Titov’s team of experts. Even so, the report indicates that less than 20% of such cases end up reaching court. These figures are based on the results of monitoring court practices and the data of the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The report emphasizes not only the growth of “fraudulent” investigations but also a new tendency wherein more and more businessmen are being subjected to criminal persecution for non-payment of wages (Article 145.1 of the Criminal Codex). Experts consider these cases as a means of pressuring businesses, as sentences for similar crimes are carried out in only 15% of such instances.

Why Liberalization is not Giving Tangible Results

The abovementioned legislative changes have not led to anything in practice, believes criminal law specialist Valery Volokh. According to Volokh,  the courts continue to place entrepreneurs under detention, investigators continue to keep objects and documents for several months without recognizing them as material evidence in a timely manner, and  law enforcement officers continue to deny detained businessmen from meeting with notaries without reason. Matvey Protasov of Moscow law firm Romanov and Partners explains that the entire liberalization campaign has one major problem: “There is no correlation between the letter of the law and the practice of the law.” Unfortunately, says Protasov, neither law enforcement nor the courts care about entrepreneurial activity, even in the most obvious situations: “As before, requests by law enforcement for the approval of detention are being approved based solely on the gravity of the accusations.”

Valeriy Zenchenko, Managing Partner of law firm Pen&Paper: “The norms for liberalizing criminal economic crime statutes exist, but liberal enforcement is not being observed. Who can fix such a situation or, at the very least, correct it? A lawyer who not only knows the new norms but also knows how law enforcement will try to use them, and also understands how to prevent investigators from doing so.” 

As an example, Protasov cites the tricks investigators use in prominent cases to send businessmen behind bars: “Rather than implicating a businessman in committing an Article 159 offense (“Fraud”),  they point to signs of an Article 210 violation (“Organization of or Participation in a Criminal Group”), which, in 100% of such cases, allows them to place the accused in an isolation unit.” Kirill Belskiy of Koblev and Partners acknowledges that law enforcement officers often employ “terminological foci” to extract concrete cases out from under the category of “entrepreneurial activity.” Agreeing with his colleagues, Alesksey Gurov, who heads the criminal law practice at Barshchevskiy and Partners, provides another example: according to Article 201 of the Criminal Codex (“Abuse of Authority in Commercial Entities and Other Organizations”), the accused may be detained, although the configuration of this same norm recognizes the possibility of such crimes being committed in the sphere of economic activity. Gurov contends that investigators frequently exploit this legal contradiction.

Artem Chekotkov of Knyazyev and Partners sees far deeper causes of the ineffectiveness of the legal institutions being established for the defense of business: “They consist not in the technical disappointments of the same norms, but in the inability to solve these issues through the creation of a specialized regime for assigning criminal liability to particular group of individuals, viz., entrepreneurs.” Chekotkov points out that there is currently no clear justification as to why businessmen specifically should hold privileges vis-a-vis criminal liability in comparison to other citizens. He further adds that ameliorating the fate of entrepreneurs who have committed offenses is not a task for criminal law.

Other Problems Facing Entrepreneurs Confronting Security Officials

In parallel, business remains in search of ways to “optimize” its own profits – and not always by honest means, says lawyer Svetlana Maltseva of Zabeyd and Partners. On the one hand, law enforcement is trying to stop such actions, but on the other hand, Maltseva adds, they often participate in them. When there is a crisis in the country, and the level of money in the budget is insufficient, then business becomes the sole source for replenishing it, explains Maltseva: “Moreover, businessmen themselves do not pay attention to the ways in which various frauds are being revealed and do not switch over to ‘new set of rails,’ instead continuing to engage in old schemes.” In fact, says Sergey Yegorov of law firm EMPP, entrepreneurs are being punished for using illegal schemes from the (relatively) distant past: “We are talking about actions committed 3 to 5 years ago, and older still.”

That is to say, by applying an ambiguous yet seemingly legal scheme today, an entrepreneur risks being implicated in one or another criminal abuse a few years down the line.  Yegerov provides a tangible example from the realm of business: “Today, builders understand that it is not worth accepting budgetary money. And if they do, and they ended suddenly before delivering the object, then they must finish the property at their own expense. Otherwise, they run a high risk of being accused of fraud. Such risks were not perceived several years ago.”

Yegorov believes that when it comes to humanizing legislation, it is worth considering the moment when businessmen stop employing ambiguous schemes for their work and voluntarily refuses to use such options in favor of more conscientious and transparent ones. In some cases, suggests Yegorov, such circumstances should be regarded as mitigating or emerging as a condition for halting the criminal persecution of an entrepreneur, “by paying a judicial fine, for example,”

Denis Saushkin, managing partner of law firm ZKS: “If the court closes its eyes to violations of the law, then why should others use it? What is the sense of changing or introducing legal norms if no one will use them? There are no laws that need changing; what is needed is a systematic approach on the part of the court in performing its own functions.” 

Belskiy notes another flaw. According to him, dishonest police officers can still exert pressure with impunity on business without initiating a criminal case: “This takes place through pre-investigation checks and ‘operational-investigative activities,’ wherein law enforcement is allowed to obtain testimony from individuals, to execute searches of properties, and to seize objects and documents.” Only a professional lawyer can distinguish such search and seizure actions from an interrogation: “Yet for the businessman, this is one and the same form of pressure, only without the risk of being imprisoned.”

Yet another serious problem in the interactions between business and the law enforcement system, argues Yegorov, is the selectivity of Russian investigators and justice. According to Yegorov, this factor does not allow for the establishment of a unified “rules of the game” for business and law enforcement. Businessmen often feel entrepreneurs fall prey to criminal proceedings simply because of bad luck, says Yegorov: “After all, his competitors are working according to the same rules.” For this reason, Chekotkov believes that a list of organizational and technical measures – not legislative ones – is needed in order to support the implementation of the current legal reforms.

Kirill Belskiy, partner of Koblev and Associates: “It is necessary to clearly establish that criminal charges cannot be deployed in instances of civil violation. So long as this does not happen, it will be possible for economic operations to be labeled as a criminal offense at the behest of interested parties.”

But Belskiy believes that the only real way out of the abovementioned problems is for the courts to restore real control over law enforcement. Returning various supervisory functions to the prosecutor’s office could also have a positive impact on the situation, he suggests.

“Absolute Mistrust”: Sovereignty, Historicism, and US-Russian Relations After Shayrat

The past several days have seen a dramatic escalation of US involvement in the Syrian conflict, and, with it, a profound shift in the timbre of US-Russian relations. On the morning of April 7, US warships in the Mediterranean Sea fired 59 cruise missiles against the Syrian government’s Shayrat airbase, which is believed to have been the staging site for a deadly chemical weapon attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Shaykhun on April 4. The strike has prompted a flurry of emotions in the United States, ranging from effusive endorsements by long-time proponents of US military intervention in the Syrian conflict, to frustration from those who had supported Trump in the belief that he would keep America out of any and all foreign entanglements.

View of damage to hanger at Shayrat Airbase, as recorded by a Russian military drone (Russian Ministry of Defense)

By contrast, many Russians have reacted to the strike with a more uniform blend of anger, anxiety, and disappointment. Yet much of this dejection appears to have stemmed not just from the fact that the United States had targeted Russia’s Syrian allies – but also from the perception that the Trump White House had shown itself to be no different than preceding administrations in terms of its flagrant disregard for Russian national interests. This sense of dejection was perhaps most clearly expressed by Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, who later vented his exasperation in a lengthy Facebook post:

That’s it. The last remaining election fog has lifted. Instead of an overworked statement about a joint fight against the biggest enemy, ISIS (the Islamic State), the Trump administration proved that it will fiercely fight the legitimate Syrian government, in a tough contradiction with international law and without UN approval, in violation of its own procedures stipulating that the Congress must first be notified of any military operation unrelated to aggression against the US. On the verge of a military clash with Russia.

Nobody is overestimating the value of pre-election promises but there must be limits of decency. Beyond that is absolute mistrust. Which is really sad for our now completely ruined relations. And which is good news for terrorists.

One more thing. This military action is a clear indication of the US President’s extreme dependency on the opinion of the Washington establishment, the one that the new president strongly criticized in his inauguration speech. Soon after his victory, I noted that everything would depend on how soon Trump’s election promises would be broken by the existing power machine. It took only two and a half months. (/END)

The thrust of Medvedev’s polemic is more or less clear from the last paragraph. Whereas the Kremlin previously had hoped that Donald Trump would overcome the “existing power machine” and leave Russia to pursue its strategic interests in Syria, the April 7 operation indicated that Trump had no intention of breaking ranks with the “Washington establishment.” Yet this begs the question: what did Moscow believe it would gain from such a break in the first place?

In order to answer this question, it is important to understand first the central importance given to “sovereignty” in Russian foreign policy. Per its classical definition, sovereignty refers to the right and capacity of an organized political body to govern itself independently of external influence or interference. That most countries conduct a “sovereign” foreign policy goes largely without saying; after all, the ability to conduct a completely autonomous foreign policy is arguably the sine qua non of sovereignty itself.

For Russia, however, the ability to operate an autonomous foreign policy is not only an inalienable facet of sovereignty, but a matter of historical precedent granted it by the dual legacies of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Putin himself best articulated this view in a now-famous speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, in which he asserted that “Russia is a country with a history that spans more than a thousand years and has practically always used the privilege to carry out an independent foreign policy,” adding, “We are not going to change this tradition today.”

The upshot of this fundamentally historicist mindset is that Moscow today regards itself as being entitled to the same prestige that had been afforded to its Imperial and Soviet forbears. To that end, Russia has long sought to secure acknowledgement of its “great power” status from the United States, whether in the form of a bilateral partnership or through demonstrations of diplomatic influence and military strength. Yet while such actions may often at cross purposes with US objectives, their aim is not to challenge the United States as such, but rather, as Russian foreign policy expert Jeffrey Mankoff puts it, to “remind the United States that Russia still matters.”

Understood in this light, the Shayrat operation represents much more than an attack on a Russian ally. It also demonstrated contempt for Russian power, which does not appear to have figured prominently as a concern in US military and diplomatic calculations beforehand. In this respect, the events of April 7 appear to have greatly disappointed those Russians who believed that Trump would treat their nation with the respect hitherto denied it by previous administrations.

Dmitry Drobnitskiy articulated this disappointment best in an April 10 op-ed for Russian online periodical Vzglyad: “They [the United States] did not discuss the strike with us. They did not take us into consideration.” To the extent that Russia still can create problems for the United States and its allies, the Trump administration should at least acknowledge Russia’s concerns, lest its further alienate the Kremlin with its indifference. The alternative is an increasingly assertive Russia, intent on demonstrating its power so that it might at last be taken seriously. Indeed, hell hath no fury like an aspiring Great Power scorned.

– Allen Maggard