The electorate’s pro-European choice in the 7 June vote was accompanied by the election of the largest number of pro-Russian MPs since 2018. Putin nevertheless aims to influence the prime minister’s policies, with whom he maintains open channels of communication. And the polls themselves suggest that Armenians do not want the partnership with Brussels to be at Moscow’s expense.
The visit to Vilnius by Bartholomew, Patriarch of Constantinople, marked the completion of the return of Lithuanian territory to his jurisdiction with the consecration of an exarch in a country that has welcomed many Orthodox Christians who left Moscow due to the schism. At the same time, Kirill was in nearby Kaliningrad, where he emphasised the ‘patriotic’ mission of his community.
The Russian academic world has been silenced. An unprecedented campaign mounted around a research project on Aristotle is even discrediting the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And whereas in 2022 scientists were the professional group most vocal in condemning the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, today their community has all but vanished from the public eye.
The website Idel.Realii has reported on a complaint from the family of a 30-year-old man from Ulyanovsk who – despite having been under the care of local psychiatric services since childhood – was nevertheless conscripted into the Russian army to fight in Ukraine. Similar cases had already been reported in Tatarstan, the Perm region and Udmurtia.
The decline in the extractive industry, linked to the fall in oil exports, is dragging what was traditionally one of the richest republics in the entire Russian Federation into stagnation. This is in contrast to Tatarstan, the other Tatar region, where the war economy, driven by drone manufacturing, is boosting the manufacturing sector.
Graduations taking place in recent weeks in Russia have been marked not only by officials and members of Putin’s party, as has been the case for years, but also by “SVO veterans,” participants in the war in Ukraine. Authorities are increasingly recruiting young people from technical institutes to train them as drone operators.
