MEDUZA/EN/VHF

Leonid Volkov and Ivan Zhdanov, two close associates of imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny, have been added to Russia's list of "terrorists and extremists."

The withdrawal from Kazakhstan Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) peacekeeping forces, which began on Thursday, January 13, will end by next Wednesday, January 19, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu said during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russian and NATO officials convened for talks at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday, January 12. The meeting came two days after diplomats from Russia and the U.S. held similar talks in Geneva. Both discussions were largely inconclusive. Washington and NATO are attempting to push back against sweeping security proposals put forward by Russia in December, while also trying to deter Moscow from launching a full-fledged attack on Ukraine. Speaking to the press after Wednesday's talks, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the two sides remain divided on fundamental issues. Meduza summarizes their comments here.

In November 2021, the feminist protest group Pussy Riot turned 10 years old. For the entirety of the group's existence, the Russian authorities (among others) have been trying their damnedest to shut them up. After staging a "punk prayer" in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral in 2012, three Pussy Riot activists were sentenced to two years in prison. After a demonstration at the 2018 World Cup, other Pussy Riot members, who ran onto the field in police uniforms, were arrested -- and the group's unofficial spokesman Pyotr Verzilov was promptly poisoned. In the last two years, arrests and prosecutions targeting Pussy Riot activists have only become more frequent. Just last month, members Maria Alyokhina and Lyusya Shtein went on hunger strike while serving two-week stints in jail. Meduza special correspondent Kristina Safonova spoke with past and present members of the group to find out who exactly they were in 2011 -- and who they are now.

According to government officials, Russia's coronavirus epidemic has reached a tipping point. On Tuesday, January 11, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, Rospotrebnadzor head Anna Popova, and Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko all raised concerns about the rapid spread of the Omicron strain during a meeting of the Presidium of the Government Coordination Council on countering COVID-19. Among other things, they warned that the daily number of new coronavirus cases in Russia could soon hit six figures. Meduza summarizes their remarks here.

The head of Moscow's Lefortovo remand prison, Alexey Romashin, has stepped down, informed sources told RTVI, RIA Novosti, and Novaya Gazeta on Tuesday, January 11. Eva Merkacheva and Alexey Melnikov of Moscow's Public Monitoring Commission (a prisoners' rights watchdog) also confirmed the prison chief's resignation to TASS and Interfax.

On Monday, January 11, diplomats from Russia and the United States held a series of security talks in Geneva. Taking place against the backdrop of Russia massing troops along its border with Ukraine, the discussion centered around a set of draft security proposals that Moscow presented to the United States and NATO in December. Speaking to reporters after the talks, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman underscored that no concrete decisions have been made as of yet. Here are their comments to the press, in a nutshell.

The year 2020 saw the death of public politics in Russia. To accommodate a plebiscite on amending the constitution, the authorities introduced a three-day voting period (leaving ballots unsupervised at polling stations overnight), as well as "mobile polling stations" (giving rise to the infamous "stump" voting). The official result was 67 percent turnout, with 78 percent of voters supporting the constitutional changes.

On January 6, Russian paratroopers from the Collective Rapid Reaction Force (KSOR) of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) began arriving in Kazakhstan. This marked the start of the first military operation by the combined forces of the six former Soviet states that make up the military alliance, which has existed now for nearly 20 years. The legality of today's operation in Kazakhstan is questionable, insofar as the use of collective force in the absence of external aggression against a CSTO member state is not codified in the organization's charter (though neither is it strictly prohibited). In the past, CSTO members have been reluctant to treat domestic turmoil as a collective security threat. In fact, CSTO states have refused multiple times to deploy combined rapid reaction forces due to the lack of external aggression in a member country experiencing a crisis.

Police and soldiers have "essentially" restored order across Kazakhstan, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev declared on Friday. "The local authorities control the situation, but terrorists are still using weapons and damaging people's property. That is why counterterrorist actions will continue until the complete destruction of the militants," Tokayev said at a meeting on January 7 with the nation's law enforcement heads.