1/ With voting underway in the Russian presidential elections, the authorities seem to want to make them even more unfair by handing mobilisation orders to election observers at polling stations. ⬇️
2/ Russian Communist Party member Alexander Safronov says that in the Black Sea city of Gelendzhik, military registration and enlistment office employees have been handing mobilisation orders to election observers.
3/ "Another electoral disgrace in Gelendzhik," Safronov writes. "Electoral crooks have involved the military registration and enlistment office - they go to commissions, scare observers, and hand out summonses."
4/ The intended message is pretty clear: if you do anything to try to ensure free and fair elections in Russia, you'll be sent to fight and possibly die in Ukraine. /end
1/ Will the real Vakhtin stand up? SOTA highlights an absurd situation in Russia's regional elections – a ballot paper on which six candidates of the same surname are listed, in an apparent effort to bury the real challenger to the United Russia candidate. ⬇️
2/ The ballot paper above is from the elections to the Council of People's Deputies of the Semiluksky District in the Voronezh region. It lists Alexey Viktorovich, Anatoly Anatolyevich, Anton Valentinovich, Viktor Anatolievich, Vladimir Ivanovich and Evgeniy Anatolyevich Vakhtin.
3/ The real Vakhtin – the candidate for the Rodina party – is Vladimir Ivanovich. Notably, the Vakhtins' names are not listed alphabetically, burying him in the middle of a swarm of fake Vakhtins. The other five Vakhtins are all self-nominated candidates.
1/ Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov is reported to have had his Deputy Prime Minister and former Minister of Health Elkham Elkhan Suleymanov buried alive on suspicion of poisoning him. Suleymanov has neither been seen nor heard from since October 2022. ⬇️
2/ The VChK-OGPU Telegram channel reports that several sources say that Kadyrov's entourage became suspicious of Suleymanov after Kadyrov's health deteriorated sharply. The channel says that Kadyrov's cronies "began to assure him that he was the victim of poisoning."
3/ "Kadyrov himself held the same view, and he vented his anger on Suleymanov. According to the source, Suleymanov personally administered certain injections to Kadyrov, and the latter decided that the deterioration of his health was connected with them."
1/ Mobilised Russian soldiers fighting near Bakhmut have recorded a video complaining about the brutal and incompetent behaviour of their commander. They reject orders to execute comrades refusing to fight and abandon the wounded, who they say are not being evacuated. ⬇️
2/ In a 4-minute video, a group of at least nine mobilised soldiers who say they are from the "76th Division" – probably the 76th Guards Air Assault Division, a nominally elite paratroop unit – denounce what they call the "criminal" orders of their commander, callsign 'Rostov'.
3/ The date when it was recorded isn't clear, but it's fairly likely that it was made before the 76th Division was very recently transferred from the Donetsk region to prop up the crumbling Russian defensive lines in the Zaporizhzhia region.
1/ General Sergei Surovikin, who disappeared in apparent disgrace after the Wagner Group's mutiny in June 2023, has been "found another position" with the Commonwealth of Independent States, according to State Duma Deputy and retired Colonel General Viktor Zavarzin. ⬇️
2/ Zavarzin has told the Russian news publication Podem: "[Surovikin] fought well, but the situation has changed.
3/ I know what you know too, that they found him another position, changed it, his chief of staff [General Viktor Afzalov] is fulfilling the commands of the commander-in-chief, he has another position, it's not bad, in the CIS or whatever it's properly called.
1/ Russian sources say that General Surovikin's well-publicised reappearance in Moscow indicates that close allies of Vladimir Putin still regard him as a potentially useful counterweight to an increasingly powerful Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. ⬇️
2/ The VChK-OGPU Telegram channel reports that sources say that Surovikin's reemergence was due to the intervention of two high-ranking Putin allies. One is Sergei Chemezov, the CEO of the defence group Rostec Corporation, and a former KGB agent and high-ranking general.
3/ The other intervenor is said to be Sergey Kiriyenko, a former Russian Prime Minister and the long-serving First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration of Russia. It was reportedly at his initiative that the photo of Surovikin and his wife was released.
1/ Half of the soldiers from the mobilised "Leningrad Regiment" are said to have been killed fighting near Bakhmut. Survivors say they were given little equipment or ammunition, and have been maltreated by incompetent officers who sent them into deadly positions. ⬇️
2/ The regiment (formally the 1486th Motor Rifle Regiment) is one of several that have mostly been recruited from St Petersburg and the surrounding Leningrad Oblast. It comprises men mobilised from September 2022 onwards, plus volunteers.
3/ According to one of the regiment's members, a man called Dmitry, after mobilisation 1,700 men were sent for two months to a military training camp at Privetninskoye, a village in the Vyborg district of the Leningrad Oblast. Now, he says, "half are no longer alive."