Ukraine launches more than 500 drones at Russia in deadly overnight attack, authorities say


Russian air defences intercepted more than 500 Ukrainian drones in a massive overnight attack that killed three people in the Moscow region, authorities said Sunday. The interceptions took place across Russia's 14 regions, as well as the annexed Crimean peninsula.


Issued on: 17/05/2026 - 
By: FRANCE 24

A soldier of Ukraine's 127th Separate Territorial Brigade launches a drone on the front line in the Kharkiv region, March 14, 2026. 

© Nikoletta Stoyanova, AP

A huge wave of more than 500 Ukrainian drones attacked Russia overnight, killing three people in the Moscow region, authorities said on Sunday.

Air defences shot down 556 drones in more than a dozen regions, including Moscow, Russia's defence ministry said, in one of the largest Ukrainian barrages of the ongoing conflict so far.

These interceptions -- far above the few dozen more often reported -- took place across 14 Russian regions, as well as the Crimean peninsula annexed from Ukraine and the Black and Azov seas, the ministry added, with the region around the capital among the worst-hit.

"A woman was killed as a result of a UAV hitting a private house. One more person is trapped under rubble," the Moscow region's Governor Andrey Vorobyov posted on Telegram, adding that the early morning attack also claimed the lives of two men.


"Since 3 o'clock in the morning, air defence forces have been repelling a large-scale UAV attack on the capital region," he said, adding four people were wounded and infrastructure facilities had been targeted.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had vowed on Friday to launch more retaliatory strikes, a day after a Russian attack on Kyiv killed 24 people.

Within Russia's capital, local authorities reported that air defence systems had intercepted more than 80 drones overnight, wounding 12 people.

"Minor damage has been recorded at the sites where debris fell," Mayor Sergei Sobyanin posted on Telegram.

One of the strikes wounded construction workers at a job site near an oil and gas refinery, Sobyanin said.

"Refinery production has not been disrupted. Three residential buildings were damaged," he added.

While the capital region is often subjected to drone attacks, the city of Moscow, around 400 kilometres (250 miles) from the Ukrainian border, is less frequently targeted.
'Entirely justified'

Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict have been at a standstill, with Kyiv unwilling to accept Moscow's maximalist demands for territory in the eastern Donbas region.

While the United States has pushed for both sides to come to the negotiating table, the talks have noticeably stalled since Washington's attention turned to the US-Israeli war on Iran in late February.

After the expiration of a three-day truce on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in World War II -- which both sides accused the other of violating -- Moscow and Kyiv have returned to trading attacks.

In response to daily bombardments by the Russian military for more than four years, Ukraine has regularly struck within Russia.

In the wake of Moscow's latest attacks on the Ukrainian capital, Zelensky insisted that Kyiv's strategy of targeting military and energy sites within Russia, so as to strike at Moscow's ability to finance the war effort, was "entirely justified".

Kyiv's allies have accused Russia of mocking diplomatic efforts to end the conflict.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

How stray Ukrainian drones pushed Latvia's prime minister to resign

Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina resigned Thursday after a key party in her coalition withdrew its support for her sacking of the defence minister after Ukrainian drones repeatedly strayed into the country. Silina had blamed defence minister Andris Spruds for the incursions, saying the country's anti-drone systems had not been deployed quickly enough.


Issued on: 14/05/2026 
By: FRANCE 24

Latvia's Prime Minister Evika Silina attends a press conference on the day of the Eastern Flank Summit in Helsinki, Finland on December 16, 2025. © Heikki Saukkomaa, Lehtikuva via Reuters

Latvia's centre-right Prime Minister Evika Silina resigned Thursday after a key party in her coalition withdrew support in a row over Ukrainian attack drones that strayed into the Baltic nation.

The drones were on an attack mission across the border in Russia, and Ukraine said they crashed into Latvian territory on May 7 after being electronically diverted by the Russian military. One caused a fire at a disused oil storage site in eastern Latvia.

Silina on Sunday sacked her defence minister Andris Spruds over the affair. She said Latvia's anti-drone systems had not been deployed quickly enough to counter the drone intrusions.

Spruds's sacking prompted nine of his allies, fellow members of the left-wing Progressive party, to quit Silina's ruling coalition, alleging she had made him a scapegoat.

Spruds formally resigned on Monday and Salina proposed a military officer as his replacement, but the Progressive party rejected him.

Their withdrawal left her government with just 41 seats in the 100-seat parliament – and opposition parties said they would call a vote of confidence just five months out from legislative elections.
Drone intrusions

"I am resigning, but I am not giving up," Silina, ​who ‌has been prime minister since 2023, said in a ⁠televised statement.

Silina's government will stay on as caretaker until a replacement is sworn in. Latvian President ‌Edgars Rinkevics, who is tasked by the constitution to select a ⁠leader of the government, will meet all parliamentary parties on Friday.

"We are fully aware of the times we are all living in," she added. "The brutal war waged by Russia in Ukraine has changed the security situation throughout Europe."

Several Russian and Ukrainian drones have crashed in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. A Ukrainian drone fell in Latvia on March 25.

Ukraine has stepped up attacks on Russian ports and energy facilities in the region in recent months.

WATCH MOREEurope’s borders under threat from Russia: Baltic states gear up for war

The drone intrusions have not caused victims but they have exposed weaknesses in the Latvia's air defence system.

Following talks with Rinkevics at a summit in Bucharest on Wednesday, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said he would send experts to Latvia to help with their air defences.

Ukraine would also work with Latvia "to build a multi-layered air defence system against different types of threats", he said.

Rinkevics said a "long-term" air defence accord would be prepared.

Silina came to power ​at the head of a broad coalition ​after the resignation of Krisjanis Karins, also from her centre-right Unity party, in August 2023.

In a SKDS/LSM ​opinion poll last month, Progressives ranked as the second most popular party nationally with 6.9 percent voter approval, ahead of the New Unity alliance – of which Unity is a member – which was sixth with 5.9 percent voter approval.

Opposition Latvia First party topped the poll, with 8.9 percent approval. The poll ⁠showed 26.1 percent of voters undecided, with 16.2 percent saying they didn't intend to vote.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)

RAGOZIN: From reform to relapse, Ukraine’s corruption problems resurface

Most of Zelenskiy's inner circle have now been implicated in a series of large corruption schemes, but corruption has been hard baked into political systems across the FSU since the collapse of the USSR. / bne IntelliNews

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By Leonid Ragozin in Riga May 16, 2026

Charges brought against president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s former chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, focus on four mansion houses in the luxury estate co-op called Dynasty. These are identified as R1, R2, R3 and R4 by the SAPO (anti-corruption prosecutor’s office) investigation which claims that the suspects laundered UAH460mn (close to €9mn) through this housing project.

The owners of the last three houses are easily identifiable from the released investigation materials - these are members of Zelenskiy’s immediate entourage, including Yermak. As for R1’s owner, the secret recordings leaked from investigators to their press suggested the person’s name is Vova, which is short for Volodymyr.

Anti-corruption prosecutors were careful to point out that the president Zelenskiy is not a subject of the ongoing investigation. But that’s only because presidents are immune from pre-trial investigations according to Ukrainian law. The impeachment procedure requires a two third majority in the parliament which Zelenskiy’s party currently controls.

For anyone focused on Ukraine, the Dynasty co-op immediately reminds of Mezhihyria, the infamous luxury estate of president Victor Yanukovych deposed by the revolutionaries in 2014. The second association is the Ozero (Lake) dacha co-op whose members, led by Vladimir Putin, turned Russia into their private corporation ruled by authoritarian means.

In a recent poll published by KIIS institute in Kyiv, Ukrainians placed corruption above the ongoing Russian aggression as the greatest threat to their country. This may sound irrational if you don’t understand to what extent corruption - Russian, Ukrainian and Western - was the main driving force behind the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

Ukrainian foreign minister Andriy Sybiha recently said that a day of war costs Ukraine $450mn. Multiplying this figure by the number of days the war has lasted for, one gets the figure of almost $700bn burned in this furnace over four years. A lion’s share of that money was paid by Western taxpayers.

For the last three decades, the struggle against corruption was a slogan of Western liberal world order crusaders trying to impose their values on the post-Soviet space. So how come the idolised poster boy of anti-Russian resistance, Zelenskiy, appears to be mired in the same kind of corruption that keeps driving Putin’s regime in Russia to ever greater escalation? This question warrants a closer look at the history of anti-corruption struggle in the former Soviet Union.

Wild Capitalism’s Helpmate

For Western audiences, corruption in former Soviet countries is mostly perceived as a thing of the past, perhaps even Soviet legacy. But while there was plenty of petty corruption in the USSR - little bribes and gifts people were routinely handing to traffic policemen, doctors or university professors - top-level corruption was not really a Soviet story, with the exception of specific republics, like Uzbekistan. The way ageing Politburo members lived feels, by modern-day standards, ascetic.

When in the late 1980s, Boris Yeltsin attacked them for enjoying better lifestyles, he was focusing on “privileges”, such as chauffeured cars, not on luxury mansion houses or million-dollar kickbacks. He famously boarded a trolleybus to advertise new “non-corrupt” ways he was promoting. It feels ironic now that we know the extent of corruption during the years of Yeltsin’s own rule, unimaginable in Soviet times.

Corruption as we know it today was being conceived in the late 1980s at the level of district committees Komsomol (Youth Communist League), their comically crookish ways brilliantly described in Yury Polyakov’s book District-Level Emergency, popular at the time. This is the environment which produced such personalities as the future oligarch and Putin’s nemesis, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

But it took the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991 for rampant, large-scale corruption to enter the scene - not just as a helpmate of wild capitalism, but even as a new ideology. The first pro-democracy mayor of Moscow, economist Gavriil Popov, promoted corruption as a necessary lubricant for a poorly regulated capitalist economy and called for legalising kickbacks.

The new business elite in Russia was formed out of businessmen closely connected to the government as well as organised crime. While capturing industries built by generations of Soviet people through fraudulent schemes like “loans for shares”, they were also capturing the Russian state. Despite outward adherence to democracy and universal values, their inherent instincts were predatory and authoritarian.

A good example is Pyotr Aven, minister of foreign trade in the shock therapy government of Yegor Gaidar, later one of Russia’s main oligarchs. Inspired by Reagan and Thatcher adoration club in the West, he promoted the idea of a “Russian Pinochet” - enlightened dictatorship that would resolve Russia’s economic hardships with an iron fist. After a few experiments, notably with Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, Russian reformers eventually produced what then was a suitable figure - Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, state capture was conducted by the new “red director” elite composed of former Soviet industrial managers and embodied by the country’s longest-serving president Leonid Kuchma.

Corruption vs Geopolitics

Anti-corruption activism in former Soviet countries came into being as soon as corruption itself. But it was only partly organic and locally rooted. Anti-corruption activism would soon become firmly intertwined with geopolitics.

The organic component is best represented by people like Aleksey Navalny or the presently forgotten 1990s anti-corruption crusader Yuri Boldyrev. The latter’s political trajectory is illustrative of the rift inside the anti-corruption movement.

Boldyrev emerged as a pro-democracy MP in 1990 and then a state auditor in the early days of Yeltsin’s rule. In one episode of his activities at the time, he insisted that the vice-mayor of St Petersburg, Vladimir Putin, should be suspended on suspicion of corruption pertaining to foreign trade. The request was rejected by none other than Aven.

Boldyrev went on to found the liberal Yabloko party but fell out with it in 1995 due to disagreements over the capture of Soviet industries and Russia’s vast mineral resources by oligarchs and foreign corporations. He was specifically opposed to the production sharing agreements between the Russian government and Western oil/gas giants which many thought provided outright robbery of Russian hydrocarbon resources. These disagreements sent Boldyrev on the course towards embracing Russian nationalism and eventually Putinism, despite his earlier attacks on Putin.

Western corporations benefited hugely from Russia’s rampant corruption and the flight of capital in the 1990s. But as their interests began clashing with those of the emerging Russian oligarchy, Western governments began championing anti-corruption causes in Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the former USSR.

The world’s best-known anti-corruption platform funded by Western governments and charities, Transparency International, arrived in Russia in 1999. If you look at Russia headlines around that time in Western media, business news was dominated by squabbles between the Russian governments and its Western corporate partners over the product-sharing agreements as well as the privatisation of Svyazinvest, Russia’s largest telecom holding.

In both cases, Putin’s new government sought to limit Western appetites or kick Western actors out of the scramble for Russian resources altogether. In the early 2000s, the emerging confrontation gradually switched to rival Russian- and Western-backed projects for supplying gas and oil into Europe. This is how the conflict turned geopolitical. Russia wanted to supply its gas to the newly-expanded EU, bypassing transit countries, especially Ukraine. Western corporations were pushing pipeline projects like Nabucco that were aimed at bypassing the Russian pipeline system and delivering directly from countries like Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.

This is the point when anti-corruption activism and geopolitics grew inseparable, with the former being increasingly weaponised by Western actors against Russia. The anti-corruption agenda dominated the Georgian Revolution of Roses in 2003 and Ukraine’s first Maidan revolution in 2004. But while in Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili’s new government did achieve a breakthrough in eliminating corruption – he sacked the entire traffic cop force and replaced it with student-hires - the Ukrainian revolution changed exactly nothing in that respect.

With geopolitics dictating the agenda and anti-corruption groups becoming overwhelmingly dependent on Western funding, the struggle against corruption became increasingly selective. Anti-corruption initiatives blasted Russian and perceived “pro-Russian” actors in former Soviet republics while turning a blind eye on shady oligarchs and outright mafiosi who were chummy with the West.

The anti-corruption struggle was so badly mired in geopolitics that by the time Navalny launched his FSK anti-corruption movement, he tried his best to avoid being seen as a Western pawn. He flirted with Russian nationalism and initially even avoided contacts with Western media. The movement he built was genuinely grassroots and organic. But the cause was already so strongly aligned with Western geopolitical interests that it was easy for the Kremlin to brand its flag-bearers as agents of the West.

The escalating conflict with the West gave Putin carte blanche to destroy Navalny’s movement and eventually kill its leader. It allowed him to consolidate the regime and outsource his domestic conflict to the neighbouring country, making him an all-round beneficiary of the continuing war.

Meanwhile, the simplistic dichotomy of corrupt Russia vs non-corrupt West, promoted by Western media, just didn’t square with people’s lived experience. Petty post-Soviet corruption which people encountered in their daily lives was largely eliminated during Putin’s years though digitalised and otherwise improved government services.

Corruption which Navalny opposed had long drifted to the highest echelons of power. It seemed grotesque by Western standards, but was it fundamentally different from the West's own corruption and what role did the West play in it becoming such a dominant phenomenon? While Western media kept drawing a primitive black and white picture, the reality felt like many shades of grey.

Corruption Export

The conflict over Ukraine exposed both the danger of unrestrained corruption on the one hand and the counter-productivity of anti-corruption activism with visible geopolitical strings attached on the other. The anti-corruption agenda was dominant at the beginning of the Euromaidan revolution, but it was soon overtaken by the geopolitical agenda of mafia state actors that were at least as corrupt as the previous regime, only more aggressive and backed by far-right thugs linked to security agencies.

Ukrainian political scientist Mikhail Minakov calls Euromaidan “a revolutionary attempt” which has never evolved into a genuine revolution, as in achieving a fundamental change of the system. The only thing that did change is the country’s geopolitical orientation.

Not only did the Western governments turn a blind eye on the aggressive redistribution of assets in the aftermath of the revolution, but they also embarked on exporting Western political corruption into Ukraine. US president’s son Hunter Biden offered his name and service to launder the reputation of Mykola Zlochevsky, a rich businessman who served as a minister in the government of the deposed president Yanukovych. President Joe Biden later forced through the resignation of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general to cover up this affair.

Biden’s arch-rival, Donald Trump, weaponised this scandal in the presidential elections of 2020, liaising with shady Ukrainian business figures and attempting to coerce the newly elected president Zelenskiy into joining the smear campaign.

That pressure may have played a significant role in Zelenskiy's abrupt U-turn on peace negotiations with Russia at the start of 2021 which coincided with Biden moving into the White House. Having reached a de-facto ceasefire by the time, Zelenskiy suddenly embarked on the Biden administration’s agenda of crossing all of Putin’s red lines - an ill-fated policy that precipitated Russia’s devastating all-out invasion of Ukraine.

That pattern of Western corruption export persists today, four years into the hot phase of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Just look at the other episode in the ongoing investigation of the Zelenskiy entourage. It focuses on the Ukrainian missile producer Fire Point which, as Ukrainian media allege, is linked to Zelenskiy’s key business associate Tymur Mindich. Guess who sits on its board? Former US State Secretary and CIA chief Mike Pompeo. Fire Point also enjoys a special relationship with the Danish government and runs a joint venture in Denmark.

Some commentators are trying to frame the current anti-corruption investigation almost as a triumph of anti-corruption forces in Ukraine. The investigation is being conducted by agencies created on the insistence of Western governments and with their direct involvement. But it’s hard not to notice the highly politicised nature of this affair, with charges and evidence in the form of taped conversations being presented in a strategic manner, with over-the-top dramatic effects aimed at discrediting top level suspects (like emphasising Yermak’s penchant for witchcraft) and leaked through opposition media and MPs.

Will it result in reducing corruption in Ukraine? The country’s post-Maidan history suggests it won’t. Does it serve as a means for achieving specific geopolitical outcomes? You bet.

INTERVIEW

A test for Ukraine, a dilemma for Zelensky: What's at stake in the Andriy Yermak corruption probe

The arrest of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former right-hand man Andriy Yermak Thursday in connection to a corruption scandal comes as a major test for both the Ukrainian government and the country's independent anti-corruption agencies. Yermak is accused of laundering 460 million hryvnia (more than $10 million) in dirty money through an elite real estate project outside of Kyiv – and of having used a secret phone to consult an astrologer on key government appointments.


Issued on: 15/05/2026 -  FRANCE24

By: Paul MILLAR

Former presidential office head Andriy Yermak appears at a hearing in Kyiv, Ukraine, May 12, 2026. © Alina Smutko, Reuters

You’d think the fortune teller would have tipped him off. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former chief of staff Andriy Yermak, who for years made key government appointments, drafted potential peace plans and held back-channel talks with both Washington and Moscow, was taken into pre-trial detention Thursday on money-laundering charges after a three-day hearing in Kyiv.

The 54-year-old lawyer and former film producer stands accused of being involved in laundering more than $10 million in embezzled funds through the construction of lavish private mansions in the village of Kozyn on the capital’s southern outskirts.

The court has set Yermak’s bail at $3.2 million, which he says he doesn’t have. He told reporters outside the court that his lawyer would work with his friends to scrape the funds together.

During the hearing, prosecutors also alleged that Yermak had kept a secret phone that he used to regularly contact a Kyiv-based astrologer known as “Veronika Feng Shui” – identified as 51-year-old Veronika Anikiyevich – to advise him on government appointments. Yermak allegedly shared candidates’ birth dates with the astrologer, who would in turn tell Ukraine’s second-most powerful man whose appointment the stars most favoured.

Former Head of the Presidential Office Andriy Yermak appears at court for a hearing in Kyiv, Ukraine, May 12, 2026. © Alina Smutko, Reuters


Yermak resigned last November after his offices were raided as part of a months-long investigation into a $100 million corruption scandal in the country’s energy sector.

The anti-corruption operation – dubbed “Midas” – accused Zelensky’s former business partner Tymur Mindich of leading a scheme to siphon off tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks from the country’s state-owned nuclear energy giant Energoatom.

The scandal, coming as Russia continued to hammer Ukraine’s energy infrastructure to starve the nation of heat and light, was met with public fury. An attempt by Zelensky last July to put Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies under the control of a presidential appointee was abandoned following rare wartime protests.

Mindich, who like Yermak maintains his innocence, reportedly fled to Israel last year ahead of a raid on his house. Former deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov and former energy minister German Galushchenko have both been detained in connection to the probe.

Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPU) have said that Zelensky himself is not under suspicion.

But the mention of a “Vova” – a common diminutive of Volodymyr – in a leaked wiretap transcript of a conversation between Mindich and an unidentified woman about the Kozyn construction project has raised questions about just how deep into the president’s circle the corruption has spread. Sitting presidents are immune from prosecution by Ukrainian law enforcement – though they can be impeached if evidence of wrongdoing is found.

To better understand the significance of this sweeping investigation, FRANCE 24 spoke with Andrii Biletskyi, the administrative director of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’s Anti-Corruption Research and Education Centre.

FRANCE 24: Just how significant is this latest development in the corruption investigation?

This is the continuation of the “Midas” operation that started last year, and which was one of the reasons why Yermak was fired from the presidential office. And we have different camps, to be honest, because some people were saying that Yermak was on these Midas recordings, and some people were saying to be careful, that he wasn’t there, it was impossible.

There are different views on this Midas operation, because some people are more sceptical about it – they are saying that this is just a political battle during the war. And some people see it as a positive thing, because it means nobody is untouchable and the anti-corruption authorities are doing their work.

Ukraine: Volodymyr Zelensy's former top aide arrested as corruption probe widens

© France 24
01:13

I think it's a test not only for anti-corruption authorities in Ukraine, but also for the government and the country in general. Because the Ukrainian law enforcement system has never seen an official or ex-official of such a high level being prosecuted or being brought to criminal responsibility.

So, it's really a test for anti-corruption authorities to finish this task, or at least to bring this case to court. And for the Ukrainian government, it's a test whether to help Yermak to escape the responsibility – whether or not to interfere or to let the case go and be whatever it's going to be.

But it's really a dilemma for them, because the government needs to understand whether they want to lose their ex-friend, or current friend, Andriy Yermak, and just forget about him. It's really a struggle for them.

But for Ukraine in general, this is a huge case, and we've never seen anything like it.

FRANCE 24: With several close allies of Zelensky under suspicion, what impact is this investigation likely to have on the president’s own support?

Politically speaking, if we're talking about his personal ratings, he is going to be losing support. Not a lot, because he didn't interfere, he didn't comment on the situation, he didn't protect his close ally, or ex-ally. So it’s a manageable situation.

On the other hand, people still rate him because he's a war-time leader, and he is protecting us, he's the higher commander-in-chief, right? So it’s bit into his ratings, but not as much as it could have, for example, in normal times. Because if not for the war, if we had seen such a scandal, it would have been political suicide for him, and we would just be waiting for the opposition to come to power.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky and then chief of staff Andriy Yermak pose for the press as they meet with Spain's King Felipe (not pictured), at the Zarzuela Palace, Madrid, Spain, November 18, 2025. © Violeta Santos Moura, Reuters

FRANCE 24: As someone who’s worked for years in the fight against corruption, how do you see the importance of Ukraine’s anti-corruption authorities being able to undertake an investigation of this magnitude?

For me personally, it's a positive sign. We as Ukrainians, and my colleagues from the anti-corruption centre, we have to talk a lot about how Ukraine is not really corrupt – we have a lot of corruption cases not because we have a lot of corruption, but rather because we have this system in place which can expose this corruption, and which can bring people to responsibility. Because of the fact that we have an independent system, which is not interfered with by political actors, they can do their job properly in a normal way, and they can expose a lot of corruption.

Of course it is [easier] not seeing corruption and not caring about it. When we don't have a lot of corruption scandals in the media, we don't know about them, and we simply don't care. We think of ourselves as good guys, and we think, okay, corruption is at a low level – if it's not being exposed, we have no problem with that.

So it’s really positive. Probably you remember that last year in July, we had huge protests in Ukraine during wartime because the government tried to neglect the procedural independence of the anti-corruption authorities. And a lot of people, a lot of young people, actually came to protest against this decision – and they won, because the government rolled it back.

And it was important for people to see that they did the right thing, so that they could see that they fought for the independence of something valuable. And by this investigation, NABU and SAPO are showing those people that it was the right call.

FRANCE 24: One of the more unexpected details of this three-day hearing has been the allegation that Yermak ran potential government appointments past an astrologer. What kind of reaction has that sparked?

Of course it was quite a surprise to hear that the chief of staff, the head of the presidential office, was consulting an astrologer for governmental appointments. It was really a surprise – I mean, it was ridiculous to hear that he was sending the birthdates of potential candidates.

It not only affects the reputation of Andriy Yermak himself, because he was already seen as this “shadow cardinal” in the office of the president, but it also brings a shadow on the presidential office in general, and the governmental system in general.

Because people have to know whether all the appointments have been going this way or not. It’s also that a bad thing for the public service in general. It was really ridiculous to hear.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

  

Moscow Struggling To Find Extra-Budgetary Funds To Complete Already Announced Icebreakers – OpEd

Russia's nuclear icebreaker Yamal. 

Photo Credit: Pink floyd88, Wikipedia Commons


May 17, 2026 
By Paul Goble


Moscow often announces that it is going to build more enormous icebreakers to ensure Russia controls the Northern Sea Route, but these are seldom completed on time or even at all, the result of problems with Russian yards and increasingly budgetary stringencies imposed as a result of Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Now to secure money to fund the construction of two nuclear icebreakers already announced, the Leningrad and the Stalingrad, Moscow is considering imposing tariffs on cargoes passing through the NSR or Russian ports (regionvoice.ru/na-ledokoly-po-kaple-vlasti-rf-obsuzhdayut-novye-portovye-sbory/).

Two tariff arrangements are now under discussion. One would impose tariffs by the ton on cargo carried on the NSR rising now and then falling a few years from now, while the other would impose a single cargo tariff per ton of cargo on all ships using Russian ports. It is unclear whether it would be phased out or not.

Rosatom, the government agency overseeing such projects, says the discussion of imposing such tariffs has been under discussion since 2019, an indication that powerful shipping interests are opposed even though many in the Russian capital want to see the icebreakers completed as a matter of national pride.

 

MOSCOW BLOG: Russia's social contract has broken down

The implicit deal Putin offered Russians at the start of the war — ignore the conflict and we'll leave you alone — has been violated. Now, for the first time, even loyalists are angry. / bne IntelliNewsFacebook

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By Ben Aris in Berlin May 12, 2026

Something has quietly shifted in Russia. Not the social and economic meltdown Western pundits have been confidently predicting almost continuously for the last two decades. Or the imminent economic collapse following each bad data set. But something more subtle: the gradual collapse of the social bargain that held Russian society together through the first four years of the Ukraine war.

Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a recent paper when Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he didn't ask Russians to support the war — he offered them something more modest: the right to live outside it. "You can live outside of the war, but you cannot be against it," went the unspoken deal.

For those who accepted the offer, the Kremlin would allow a way of life close to their pre-war existence. Many accepted it — some out of genuine indifference to others' suffering, some out of desperation, some simply because the alternative was unthinkable.

That bargain held, more or less, through 2024. The ruble didn't collapse. Borders stayed open. Wages rose. The sanctioned shelves were quickly restocked with parallel-imported goods. A curious wartime prosperity emerged from the rubble of the old life. Indeed, after the initial shock of the invasion of 2022, the following two years were amongst the most prosperous since the fall of the Soviet Union. The austerity of almost two decades of Putinomics was turned on its head and the spigot of massive state spending finally opened. A War middle class emerged and the war in the south had very little impact on everyday life. With it came what Baunov calls "everyday patriotism" — a fragile optimism built not on ideology but on the simple satisfaction of survival.

By spring 2026, the regime had shredded that arrangement. "The Russian regime had unceremoniously violated the terms of this compromise agreement one after another," Baunov writes, "and now society is angry. People did not agree to ignore the war only to become the target of prohibitions and repressions themselves and now feel cheated and deceived."

The war comes home

The war has finally arrived in the courtyards of regular Russians. As the military Keynesianism boom of 2023 and 2024 began to fade away as industrial capacity utilisation maxed out the economy was no longer able to absorb the torrent of military spending of around $140bn a year and prices rose. The personal income gains of the previous years were eaten away. The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) hiked interest rates to a crushing 21% to kill inflation, but it wouldn’t die. Then the regular began to clamp down on credits in an unorthodox experiment to deliberately slow growth to pull inflation down. It worked: inflation has fallen from a sticky 10% last year to 5.9% in April and is continuing to fall. The CBR has managed to put through 550bp of rate cuts but interest rates remain in double digits.

With consumption falling, borrowing impossibly expensive, and growth slowing, the slowdown is hitting small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) particularly hard where sales are falling and driving many to the wall. It’s not a crisis yet, but dark clouds have rolled over the skies that were sunny before.

However, the biggest catalyst for the growing public anger is not the war itself or its effects on the economy — it is the internet blackouts.

As the war goes into its fifth year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has rolled out a more overt repression than ever before as the Kremlin finally tries to take full control of the Internet as part of a policy of digital sovereignty, modelled on China’s control of the online world.

During the Victory Day period in Moscow and St Petersburg, mobile internet went completely dark for over four hours on May 5, disabling banking apps, taxis, delivery services and SMS. Even services on Putin's own "whitelist" — which he had personally guaranteed would remain accessible — failed.

The response from a Russian model and popular blogger called Victoria Bonya illustrated the shift in public mood with unusual clarity. In a viral Instagram post she addressed Putin directly — not the state regulator Roskomnadzor, not some lower-level official, but Putin himself — and told him: "There is a lot that you don't know." She listed a range of problems, primarily internet blackouts, that officials are too scared to raise with him.

The post was remarkable on two levels. First, it identified Putin personally as the source of the problem, stripping away the usual deflection onto bureaucratic intermediaries. Personally criticising Putin by name is dangerous, as opposition leader Alexei Navalny found out at the cost of his life two years ago.

Second, it inverted the fundamental logic of the war's legitimacy. The entire "special military operation" rested on the premise that Putin has access to intelligence that ordinary Russians do not — plans for a Nato attack, hidden threats, secret knowledge justifying extraordinary measures, Baunov said. Bonya's message turned that premise inside out: we, the people, know about the country's problems, and perhaps the president doesn't. If he doesn't know about the internet blackouts, maybe he didn't know what he was doing in February 2022 either.

The regime's response was swift and harsh. The authorities have banned WhatsApp and Telegram – the two most popular messaging services – on the grounds they are "non-transparent". In their place the state is pushing a homegrown replacement — the Max app — whose transparency is of a rather different, less reassuring kind – unlike the privately-owned apps, the FSB has full access to all the users data and content as part of an expanding surveillance operation.

Simultaneously, the Finance Ministry has raised VAT from 20 to 22 per cent and introduced requirements to register a taxpayer identification number for bank transfers that previously required only a phone number. Russians now complain they have to completely declare, with documentation, the details of any transaction they make through the banking system.

The cumulative effect is an increasingly visible surveillance and extraction apparatus. Russians who accepted the wartime bargain accepted it on the understanding that the state would leave their private lives alone. The combination of communications monitoring, tax tightening and internet control and increasingly obvious repressions has demolished the social pact. Personal space — Baunov notes — is all that unfree people have left once the state has taken over public space. The regime is now encroaching on that too.

The fear beneath the surface

This would be the second time that Putin has reneged on his social contract with the people. When he took over in 2000 there was another simpler social contract with the people: you stay out of politics, and I will stay out of your everyday lives.

That deal held for much of the boom years in the noughties and life improved out of all recognition. The size of the economy doubled, companies boomed, wages were hiked by almost 10% every year for nearly a decade. But that boom too faded away after the 2008 global financial crisis. The petrostate economic model was exhausted by 2013. And the annexation of Crimea and the start of the sanctions regime in 2014. Throughout this period, the Kremlin slowly tightened the screws and introduced measures like the “foreign agents” bill that allowed the state to brand anyone it liked a de facto spy and close opposition parties and press.

Things came to a head with Navalny’s return to Russia from Germany where he had been recovering from an attempted state-sponsored assassination attempt. He was immediately arrested and sent to a high security prison in Russia’s far north. He was dead three years later.

Putin realised there was no recovering from these blows to civil liberties for the Kremlin's reputation. The gloves came off and Putin abandoned what commentator Mark Galeotti dubbed “repression-lite” for the real thing.

Fast forward to this year’s Victory Day parade, one of the most important events on the public calendar – an event that Putin has used to unify the Russian people in their shared pride of the defeat of the Nazis in what they call The Great Patriotic war.

This year it was held without rehearsals, without military hardware, with minimal personnel and with internet jammed across Moscow to prevent Ukrainian drones from navigating to the site. It was, as Baunov observed, not a demonstration of strength, but of fear.

"A military parade is intended as a demonstration of strength and bravery, but if it is held furtively, without rehearsals, and with the internet jammed, it demonstrates nothing but fear and weakness,” Baunov said.

Putin's approval rating has declined noticeably this year, but still remains above its pre-war highs. Usually the parade lasts hours with colourful troops marching with impeccable timing across the famous square. This year the whole event lasted barely 45 minutes and Putin’s speech was confused and rambling. His pre-war image — bare-chested, horse riding vigorous strong man has faded away to a bloated-faced bureaucrat that hides in bunkers from where he runs his wars. "Instead of a guarantor," Baunov writes, "he is becoming a liability."

The social tradeoff that sustained Russian acquiescence for four years was always fragile. It required the regime to keep its side of the bargain: let people live. The regime has stopped doing so. What comes next is the question that no model has yet answered — because what is happening now in Russia has no modern precedent.

Russia's September election: United Russia will win but the sands are shifting under its feet

A Kremlin-created liberal party has overtaken the Communists in the polls, internet blackouts have become a political lightning rod, and Putin's approval rating has hit a post-war low. None of this will change the outcome — but it reveals what the Kremlin fears / bne IntelliNews

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By Ben Aris in Belrin May 13, 2026

Russia goes to the polls on September 18-20 for its first State Duma elections since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. All 450 seats in the lower house of the Federal Assembly are at stake, and the outcome — United Russia retaining its overwhelming majority — is not seriously in doubt. The real interest lies elsewhere: in what the shifting tectonic plates of Russian domestic politics reveal about the health of a regime that is simultaneously fighting a grinding war, managing a faltering economy and suppressing its own citizens' access to the internet.

The most striking development of the pre-election period is the emergence of the New People party as Russia's second most popular political force, overtaking the Communist Party — a shift that illuminates both the sources of public discontent and the Kremlin's increasingly anxious attempts to channel it and parse the electorate into the focused subsections.

Internet blackouts, rising prices and economic stagnation have created a pool of anger that someone in Russia's managed democracy had to absorb. The Kremlin's choice of vessel tells you something important about what Moscow's political managers fear.

The mood: souring, not revolutionary

Putin ended 2025 with approval ratings that remained high by international standards — around 74% in VTsIOM surveys. By spring 2026, that number had slid to 65.6%, its lowest level since the start of the war. The trigger was not the front lines or the economy alone, but something more visceral: the internet. Mobile communications blackouts during the Victory Day period, the blocking of WhatsApp and Telegram, and the clumsy rollout of a domestic replacement app called Max – basically a surveillance proxy for the FSB and everyone knows it – have infuriated ordinary Russians in a way that abstract macroeconomic data does not.

Russia's budget deficit ballooned to RUB4.6 trillion in the first quarter of 2026 — already 21% above the full-year target — as oil revenues collapsed before the Iran war's price boost. The economy is skirting stagnation. The Bank of Russia has kept interest rates sky high – currently 14.5% - to fight inflation, strangling the civilian economy. GDP growth has slowed to 1% and contracted by 0.3% in the first quarter. The war-driven boom definitively over.

Half of Russians now tell the independent Levada polling agency that the political situation is "tense," and 10% call it "critical." State pollster VTsIOM records Putin's approval at a seven-week consecutive low. None of this threatens the regime. But it shapes its choices as September approaches.

United Russia: The ruling party enters the campaign from a position of structural dominance but polling weakness. VTsIOM currently places it at around 27-34%, down sharply from its official 49.8% in the 2021 elections. As IntelliNews reported at the time, the vote was clearly fixed, but that was not enough to bring the people to the street as they did in very large numbers in 2011. Independent analysts estimating 13-16mn fraudulent votes were injected into the count. The party's real support in 2021, stripped of manipulation, was estimated at 31-35%. The trajectory since then has been downward.

The Kremlin's political managers face a dilemma. United Russia cannot campaign on the war — the September 2025 regional elections demonstrated that pro-war messaging actually depresses turnout and pushes voters toward other parties. Yet Putin's personal obsession with the conflict means the party cannot ignore it entirely. The compromise appears to be a campaign built on "development and stability" rhetoric, with plans to integrate veterans of the so-called special military operation as candidates — though the 2025 regional elections showed that war participants secured only 2.3-3.7% of mandates, far below the Kremlin's stated 10% target, according to Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Structurally, United Russia is a coalition of interest groups rather than an ideological party. The DumaBingo lobbying analysis project identifies clear factions representing Gazprom, Rostec, Russian Railways and regional bureaucracies, all operating within the party's formal structures. Russian Railways contractors alone donated RUB22bn rubles to the party in 2024. This heterogeneity is both the party's strength — it absorbs and manages elite interests — and its vulnerability, as internal conflicts routinely spill into regional politics. United Russia will win in September. The question is whether it will win with enough seats to maintain constitutional amendment capability.

New People: The most significant story of the 2026 election cycle is the rise of a party founded in March 2020 specifically as a Kremlin project — and which has now achieved a level of genuine popularity that its creators did not entirely intend. According to VTsIOM, New People has held second place in polls for four consecutive weeks with 13.4% support, up from 6.6% a year ago. The FOM polling agency, using face-to-face methodology, puts the figure at a more modest 6% — but even that represents dramatic growth for a party that entered the Duma in 2021 with barely 5.3% of the vote.

The mechanism of New People's rise is interesting. The party has opposed internet shutdowns and app blockings since 2022, when Russia blocked Instagram. Back then it was a niche position; now, with WhatsApp and Telegram blocked and Moscow's streets intermittently dark to mobile data like during the Victory Day parade last week, it is the central domestic political issue.

New People's ex-presidential candidate Vladislav Davankov pledged at the party's March 2026 conference that volunteers would use special backpacks to provide free Wi-Fi on the streets — a gesture that encapsulates perfectly the party's approach: channelling real discontent through theatrical opposition that never attacks the security services, never names the officials responsible, and never demands accountability.

The party is a project of Russia’s éminence grise and Yeltsin-era Prime Minister, Sergei Kiriyenko, now the deputy chief of staff of the presidential administration. He is in charge of domestic political policy and has long wanted to displace the Communist Party as Russia's second political force and replace it with something more manageable.

He appears to have succeeded. New People vote with the Kremlin 96.3% of the time in the Duma. Its opposition is performative, not structural. It belongs to the so-called “systemic opposition” which is effectively an extension of the Kremlin’s control over the Duma. But it is a performative opposition that resonates with urban, educated, internet-using Russians is exactly what the Kremlin needs to absorb discontent without allowing it to crystallise into a genuine opposition.

The party's weakness is its shallowness. Founded by Aleksei Nechayev as an extension of his Captains entrepreneurship programme, it has no real regional network, no ideology beyond vague modernising liberalism, and only a handful of recognisable names — Nechayev himself, former Yakutsk mayor Sardana Avksentyeva and Davankov. In many regional elections, its candidate lists are filled with random figures or apparatchiks who could just as easily run for United Russia. Its surge in support is real but fragile — built on a single issue. If internet restrictions ease, the surge may evaporate.

Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF): The Communists enter September as a giant in decline and the weakest position they have occupied since the early 1990s. In the wild days of Yeltsin’s regime, the KPRF were a real force to be reckoned with and regularly defied the president with a large fraction in the Duma. After Russian President Vladimir Putin took over in 2000 he purged the Duma and starved of any real influence the Communist party has atrophied into a shadow of its former self. The leaders should have retired and given over control to the younger generation of more progressive members who have genuine popular appeal, doing well in regional elections when they are allowed to stand, but the old guard has clung to their cushy jobs instead and let the party stagnate.

In 2021 the KPRF officially won 18.9% and 57 seats on the party list — a result that even with significant fraud correction probably reflected genuine support of 25-27%, inflated by Alexei Navalny's Smart Voting project which directed protest voters toward the communist candidates by default as they were the only real challengers to the incumbents.

That coalition has collapsed. Navalny is dead. The urban liberal protest vote that briefly aligned with the Communists has nowhere to go. And the party's leadership — veteran leader Gennady Zyuganov, now in his 80s — gave unconditional support to the war in February 2022, alienating precisely the younger voters who had lent the party credibility.

The KPRF has opposed internet restrictions, but the position sits awkwardly alongside its pro-war, Stalinist image. In the 2025 regional elections, the party lost approximately 11 percentage points compared to 2021 results in the same areas. Its faction in Krasnodar shrunk from six city council deputies to one. The Communists failed to enter the parliaments of Vladimir and Lipetsk, and lost all seats in Magadan and Syktyvkar. Current VTsIOM polling puts the party at 8-10%. Zyuganov, Bondarenko and Grudinin still make the Levada list of most-mentioned politicians after Putin — testimony to the party's residual name recognition even as its electoral base erodes.

The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR): the death of the party’s charismatic founder and leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky in April 2022 deprived Russia's oldest parliamentary party of the one resource it had in abundance: personality. His successor, Leonid Slutsky, is a competent operator without charisma who has responded to his inheritance by purging the party — removing notable figures Yaroslav Nilov, Vasily Vlasov and Alexei Didenko from party leadership in a series of moves that weakened the organisation's regional presence without strengthening central control. The party failed to protect prominent figures from law enforcement: former popular Khabarovsk governor Sergei Furgal was arrested in 2020, and Slutsky's response — sending a figure locals immediately dubbed "Zhirinovsky's bathhouse attendant" as replacement — surrendered whatever political capital the arrest had created.

The LDPR has experimented with anti-immigrant rhetoric ahead of September, permitted by the Kremlin as a way of pulling votes from the Communists. The tactic delivered second place in seven of eleven regional assembly votes in 2025. In national polls the party currently sits at around 10-13% — potentially ahead of the Communists in some surveys. Whether it can consolidate that position through September depends on whether Slutsky can campaign effectively or will be overshadowed by Nechayev's media machine.

A Just Russia: Twenty years of existence and four image reinventions have left Russia's social-democratic party in a state of institutional exhaustion. Setting out as a genuine liberal pseudo-institutional non-systemic opposition party, its most recent transformation — from moderately left-wing to ultra-patriotic — alienated a chunk of its regional base, including an entire faction that departed the St Petersburg Legislative Assembly rather than be associated with Yevgeny Prigozhin's imagery the late head of the Wagner PCM, which the party latched onto. Senior figures have departed or been arrested; the case of Vadim Belousov, whose company Makfa, Russia’s biggest pasta-maker and a global giant, was effectively nationalised into the orbit of the former head of the FSB, Dmitry Patrushev's associates, illustrates how exposure to power in Putin's Russia can end for those who lose their protection.

The party's ratings across all polling agencies hover near the 5% threshold needed to get into the Duma at all. Its survival in September depends substantially on the Kremlin's goodwill — whether the presidential administration chooses to allow it to cross the threshold, or permits it to fall below and lose its parliamentary presence entirely. Sergei Mironov has led the party through every iteration of its existence. The question is whether he leads it through one more.

Managed democracy, but anxious

Russia's September elections will produce a Duma dominated by United Russia and populated by compliant opposition parties. Voting will be held across three days — September 18-20 — including in occupied Ukrainian territories, where 11 new single-member constituencies have been created. Electronic voting will expand, reducing transparency. Golos, Russia's independent electoral monitoring organisation, will be systematically blocked. The result will be predetermined in its broad outlines.

What the pre-election period has revealed is a Kremlin that is managing discontent with increasing anxiety, deploying new instruments — New People, anti-immigrant rhetoric, leaked internal warnings to Putin via state media — precisely because the old ones are less reliable than they were. A United Russia that once absorbed everything now needs help. The party that once defined the system is becoming one of its components. Whether that is a sign of maturity or fragility in Russia's managed democracy is the question September will not fully answer — but will sharpen considerably.