Russia: In Moscow’s grip, Crimea holds first vote to Russian parliament | AFP

Shaded by cypress trees on Crimea’s Black Sea shore, a group of locals watch as folk singers in tall headdresses boom out a patriotic song about Russia with the lyrics: “I have no other motherland.” Two-and-a-half years after Moscow annexed the strategic peninsula from Ukraine, residents are gearing up to vote Sunday in their first polls to elect deputies to Russia’s national parliament. The ballot in Crimea — not recognised by Kiev or the international community — looks set to bind the region still closer to Moscow as the new pro-Kremlin elite cements its grip and opposition is silenced.

Russia: The Most Shocking Moments From Russia’s ‘Sluggish’ Election Campaign | Newsweek

Russia will elect a new parliament Sunday, after an election campaign declared the “most sluggish” for a decade, according to the main, independent monitor of national votes. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia is expected to win, without a major contender even close. Meanwhile, the handful of liberals competing for seats face a stiff challenge to enter parliament at all. Despite the potentially predictable outcome, at least 14 parties, not counting independent candidates, are running and the vigor of the campaigning has produced some shocking moments. … Maria Baronova is running for a seat in one of Moscow’s constituencies as an independent candidate; she made headlines last month after her application to participate in the election was approved. Baronova, a former anti-government protester, is backed by one of Putin’s fiercest dissident rivals, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose organisation has frequently complained of harassment by authorities.

Russia: Openly Gay Candidates Push Back In Russia’s Duma Elections | RFERL

Bulat Barantayev is calling for the impeachment of Russian President Vladimir Putin and for all corrupt officials to be tried and imprisoned. But that’s not why he has no chance of winning a legislative mandate in Russia’s September 28 Duma elections. Barantayev, by his own admission, won’t be representing Novosibirsk from the liberal Parnas coalition because he is one of the first openly gay men to run for the Duma in modern Russian history. “For a long time now, I have used all opportunities to cultivate an audience for accepting LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] people,” Barantayev told RFE/RL when asked why he was running in a race he is certain he can’t win. “By my example, I show that gays in Russia can create their own successful businesses, can meet with people, can have children, and can even run for the State Duma.”

Russia: As elections loom, little space for protests in Russia | AFP

Ilya Gushchin says the two and a half years he spent in prison for standing up to the Kremlin were a warning from the authorities for ordinary Russians. “It was a threat to the population to quieten down,” Gushchin, 28, told AFP. “For society it showed that the authorities were willing to do whatever was needed to stay in power.” Russia is currently gearing up for parliamentary elections on September 18 that pro-Kremlin parties look set to dominate, and that message seems to have registered. The last time the country voted in legislative polls five years ago, tens of thousands of ordinary citizens took to the streets for mass protests that became the biggest challenge to President Vladimir Putin’s domination of the country since he took charge in 2000. This time around there appears to be little chance of a repeat.

Russia: Ukraine, Russia clash over upcoming Duma elections | Kyiv Post

As elections to Russian parliament, Duma, approach, Ukraine says it will not allow Russian polling stations on its territory – even if they are placed in the diplomatic establishments. Both countries have exchanged unfriendly statements on Sept. 10. “The President (of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko) instructed the foreign minister (Pavlo Klimkin) to inform Moscow about the inability of Russian elections in Ukraine,” Poroshenko’s spokesperson, Svyatoslav Tsegolko, wrote on Twitter on Sept. 10. Russia holds the elections on Sept. 18. It plans to open polling stations in Russian consulates and embassy in Ukraine, for the Russians living in Ukraine to vote. In 2014, some 150,000 Russian citizens were living in Ukraine according to official data. But Ukrainian government isn’t going to allow the Russian polling stations to open in Ukraine. The reason is, Russian authorities also plan to hold the elections in the annexed Crimea.

Russia: Putin Shuts Down Last Russian Independent Pollster In Anticipation of Russian and US Elections | Forbes

Vladimir Putin has based his claim to legitimacy on his high favorability ratings, the anchor of which has been the “independent” Levada Center, headed by the prominent Russian sociologist, Lev Gudkov. Among Levada’s claim to impartiality is its ties with foreign academic heavy weights from top universities and think tanks. The Kremlin has other polling organizations, such as VTSIOM, but they are viewed as doing the bidding of the Russian government. A Levada finding of high Putin ratings is worth its weight in gold to Putin and his regime. He has decided to throw this asset to the wolves. On September 6, Putin’s Ministry of Justice classified the Levada Center a “foreign agent,” citing its foreign ties with Columbia, George Washington, and Columbia Universities and with polling organizations such as Gallup, MORI, and Ipsos. Levada stands accused of working in the interests of these foreign entities. Although the “foreign agent” label does not automatically shut down Levada, the September 6 issue of Kommersant cites Gudkov as stating “the work of our organization has been in fact stopped.” The content of the article, however, has mysteriously disappeared, meaning that the Kremlin does not want this news circulating. Moscow speaks (Govorit Moskva) confirms that Levada is appealing the foreign-agent classification and has ceased its polling work. In shutting down Levada, Putin can no longer claim high ratings confirmed by respected independent pollsters. His favorability ratings form the core of his regime. Putin could pay a high price for this move, but he has decided the benefits outweigh the costs.

Russia: Polling agency is victim as Kremlin opts to shoot the messenger | CS Monitor

With less than two weeks to go before parliamentary elections, and the ratings of the ruling United Russia party dropping fast, the Kremlin has apparently decided to shoot the messenger. The Levada Center, Russia’s only independent public opinion agency, was forced to stop work this week, a move that critics of the Kremlin read as an effort to block public perceptions that the ruling party’s popularity is plunging – even though nobody is directly disputing the highly respected organization’s findings. The Kremlin has pledged that voting on Sept. 18 will be open and transparent, so as not to lead to the kind of mass protests that erupted following allegedly fraud-tainted elections five years ago.

Russia: Is Moscow meddling in the presidential election? | USA Today

Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is calling on President Obama to retaliate against Russia for interference in the presidential election — meddling the California congressman says is designed both to “sow discord” in American politics and to help elect Donald Trump. “What makes this new and troubling is not just the intelligence-gathering of hacking into a political party,” Schiff told Capital Download on Wednesday, “but the attempt to interfere with the election process by dumping information in an effort, I think, to be disruptive, to sow discord in the United States, to cause people to question both the fairness of elections and maybe even the election results, as well as to potentially tip things in the direction of a favored candidate by the Kremlin.”

Russia: Levada pollster named as ‘foreign agent’: justice ministry | Reuters

Russia’s only major independent pollster, the Levada Centre, has been designated as a “foreign agent”, the Russian Justice Ministry said on Monday, two weeks ahead of nationwide parliamentary elections. “The recognition of the organization as a non-commercial body performing the functions of a foreign agent was established in an unscheduled document check,” the Justice Ministry said in a statement. It did not give a reason for its decision. Levada was not immediately available for comment. Russia’s main pro-Kremlin United Russia party is expected to comfortably win the elections on Sept. 18, which are seen as a dry run for Vladimir Putin’s presidential re-election campaign in 2018.

Russia: No easy task for Russian citizens to cast ballot in Ukraine | Ukraine Today

Russia will hold elections to the State Duma, the lower house of the parliament, on Sept.18. For Russian citizens living in Ukraine, participating in next month’s parliamentary elections won’t be as easy as it was five year ago, when there were 17 voting stations scattered across the country, Meduza reports. This year, citing concerns about safety, Russia is only making four voting stations available to citizens. In 2011, roughly 23,000 Russians voted in Ukraine.

Russia: Putin’s Election Grip Is So Tight Even His Nemesis Khodorkovsky Can Take Part | Bloomberg

The last time Vladimir Putin’s political party won national elections, ballot-stuffing allegations sparked the biggest protests of his rule. Five years on, Putin appears to be so confident in his hold on power that even his most dogged adversary is welcome to challenge United Russia in next month’s parliamentary polls — Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the London-based former oil billionaire who was charged with murder in absentia in December. Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison, is back doing what he says got him jailed in the first place: supporting Putin’s opponents. All but one of the 19 candidates he’s grooming have been accepted by authorities overseeing the vote. Since being freed in 2013, Khodorkovsky has vowed to use what’s left of his fortune to hasten the end of the Putin era, though he admits the Kremlin’s grip on the electoral process is so strong it has nothing to fear, for now.

Russia: Parliamentary elections being rigged, says Russian opposition | Reuters

Russian opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov said on Thursday parliamentary elections next month were being rigged against his party, meaning it would have to win up to three times more votes than legally necessary to get into parliament. Starved of air time, vilified by Kremlin-backed media, and physically attacked on the stump, Kasyanov and his allies in the People’s Freedom party or PARNAS face an uphill struggle to break into the 450-seat lower house of parliament on Sept. 18. Despite an economic crisis, the main pro-Kremlin United Russia party is expected to comfortably win the elections, which are seen as a dry run for Vladimir Putin’s presidential re-election campaign in 2018. The crisis means United Russia’s margin of victory may be slimmer than recent years however, giving PARNAS, which currently has no seats in parliament, a glimmer of hope.

Russia: Duma election: What to expect | New Eastern Europe

Over the past few years, the Russian authorities have been gradually rolling out a strategy for managing the upcoming State Duma election. What are the elements of this strategy, and will it help the Kremlin achieve its objectives? Like most modern authoritarian regimes which organise elections, the regime in Russia aspires to be viewed as broadly legitimate while keeping political pluralism highly constrained. These two objectives, evidently, are difficult to reconcile. In order to increase legitimacy, the regime allows more electoral competition, but at the same time it has an incentive to minimise competition, to which end it resorts to heavy-handed tactics including fraud, undermining its legitimacy. Electoral authoritarian regimes such as Russia’s employ idiosyncratic strategies to balance the dual objectives of maintaining legitimacy and limiting competition. They thereby face inevitable trade-offs in crafting their strategies and must regularly adapt them to account for changing circumstances. In the previous Duma election of 2011, the authorities sought to bank on the perceived strength of the ruling United Russia party and on the administrative capacity of the authorities (at different levels) to deliver required election results. This strategy had several flaws. Fewer people than anticipated were ready to vote for United Russia. Analyses of the voting results show that in many areas where no major election fraud was committed, only a quarter to a third of votes went to the ruling party. In order to get a (slight) majority of seats in the Duma, major election fraud was necessary. It was met by significant upheaval, mainly in the form of a wave of popular protests that drew the biggest crowds in Russia since the early 1990s. The fallout from the 2011 election was viewed in Russian political circles as a serious crisis.

Russia: Parliamentary elections to take place under new rules | Deutsche Welle

Russia will elect a new parliament three months earlier than planned after a majority vote in mid-2015 to move the elections up from December 4 to September 18 of this year. The initiative from the Duma chairman Sergey Naryshkin was supported by President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, as well as Just Russia and the Liberal Democrats. Like the Communists, who are more or less loyal to the Kremlin, these parties are sure to remain in parliament. Meanwhile, a coalition between the two main opposition parties has fallen apart. The “Russian Democratic Party” (Yabloko) and the “People’s Party of Freedom” (RPR-PARNAS), co-founded by Boris Nemtsov, the opposition politician who was murdered in February 2015, will now go into the election independently from each other. Polls say that these “outlier” parties barely stand a chance of crossing the 5 percent threshold for representation.

Russia: Hey, don’t blame us, 20 of our government organizations were hacked too | Computerworld

The FBI is investigating a previously unreported cyberattack on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC); like the earlier Democratic National Committee (DNC) breach, Russia denied any involvement. Russia previously called claims that it was behind the DNC hack and trying to influence the presidential election “absurd.” It has repeatedly “denounced the ‘poisonous anti-Russian’ rhetoric coming out of Washington.” Regarding the DCCC attack, a Kremlin spokesman told Reuters, “We don’t see the point any more in repeating yet again that this is silliness.” Then, days after news about the DCCC hack broke, Russia claimed that someone hacked 20 of its government organizations. This weekend, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) released a statement claiming that it had discovered malware designed for cyberespionage on the computer networks of 20 Russian government organizations.

Russia: Why would Russia interfere in the U.S. election? Because it sometimes works. | The Washington Post

Late last week, WikiLeaks released private emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. Experts suspect the documents were obtained by hackers affiliated with the Russian government. Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager has even charged that the Russians are trying to use the emails to help elect Donald Trump. Since then, people on the left and right have expressed outrage that a foreign government would seek to influence American politics. That furor is naive. Foreign governments have sought to shape other country’s politics before. The United States has honed interventions in other countries’ elections to something of an art form. They (we) do it because such interventions can succeed, especially if they find willing accomplices in the targeted country.

Russia: In D.N.C. Hack, Echoes of Russia’s New Approach to Power | The New York Times

Of the questions raised by charges that Russia was involved in the release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails, at least one — why would Russia do such a thing? — can be answered with a little-noticed but influential 2013 Russian military journal article. “The very rules of war have changed,” Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, wrote in the Military-Industrial Courier. The Arab Spring, according to General Gerasimov, had shown that “nonmilitary means” had overtaken the “force of weapons in their effectiveness.” Deception and disinformation, not tanks and planes, were the new tools of power. And they would be used not in formally declared conflicts but within a vast gray between peace and war. Those ideas would appear, the next year, in Russia’s formal military doctrine. It was the culmination of a yearslong strategic reorientation that has remade Russian power, in response to threats both real and imagined, into the sort of enterprise that could be plausibly accused of using cyberattacks to meddle in an American presidential election. Like so many military rethinks, what became known as the Gerasimov Doctrine began as an effort to solve a seemingly urgent problem.

Russia: How Putin Weaponized Wikileaks to Influence the Election of an American President | Defense One

Close your eyes and imagine that a hacking group backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin broke into the email system of a major U.S. political party. The group stole thousands of sensitive messages and then published them through an obliging third party in a way that was strategically timed to influence the United States presidential election. Now open your eyes because that’s what just happened. On Friday, Wikileaks published 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. They reveal, among other things, thuggish infighting, a push by a top DNC official to use Bernie Sanders’ religious convictions against him in the South, and attempts to strong-arm media outlets. In other words, they reveal the Washington campaign monster for what it is. But leave aside the purported content of the Wikileaks data dump (to which numerous other outlets have devoted considerable attention) and consider the source. Considerable evidence shows that the Wikileaks dump was an orchestrated act by the Russian government, working through proxies, to undermine Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. “This has all the hallmarks of tradecraft. The only rationale to release such data from the Russian bulletproof host was to empower one candidate against another. The Cold War is alive and well,” Tom Kellermann, the CEO of Strategic Cyber Ventures told Defense One.

Russia: Is Moscow trying to influence Trump-Clinton race? | The Hill

The unknown identity of a mysterious hacker claiming to be the sole architect behind the infiltration of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has raised fears that Russia may be trying to influence the U.S. election. The idea sounds like the work of conspiracy theorists — but both security and foreign policy experts say it fits with a historical pattern of Russian intelligence operations. “I think it would naive of us to rule that out,” said Jason Healey, a director at the Atlantic Council who has worked on cyber defenses at the White House. The hack comes as the Senate is weighing its annual intelligence policy bill, which would establish a committee specifically to counter “active measures by Russia to exert covert influence.” The firm that investigated the breach for the DNC attributed the attack to the Russian government and most onlookers originally interpreted it as traditional espionage — a straightforward way of gathering intelligence about the American political landscape, something the U.S. itself does.

Russia: Opposition descends into infighting before elections | The Guardian

Russia’s liberal opposition has been subjected to all kinds of pressure in the last few months, from leaked clandestine sex tapes to dubious court cases and physical violence. As parliamentary elections approach in September, the authorities appear to be throwing every dirty trick in the book at them. But the opposition is also engaged in a fight with enemies who are proving even more destructive than the Kremlin: each other. Parliamentary elections on 18 September will set the tone for a presidential election in 2018, in which Vladimir Putin is expected to stand and win another six-year term in office. Currently, the Russian Duma is made up of just four parties: the pro-Kremlin behemoth United Russia, and three smaller parties known as the “systemic opposition”, which provide a semblance of competition but do not oppose the Kremlin on any substantive issues. Lying outside the system are the other opposition parties, ranging in spectrum from liberals to nationalists. They are not given airtime on television and are often struck off the ballot in elections. With the political system carefully controlled and state television only ever covering the opposition in negative terms, there is little public support for rocking the boat. However, when the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny was allowed to stand for mayor of Moscow in 2013, he won 27% of the vote, showing there is appetite for new faces among a certain section of urban Russians.

Russia: Chechnya Schedules Preterm Parliamentary Elections | RFE/RL

At the proposal of parliamentary speaker Magomed Daudov, Chechnya’s 41 lawmakers voted unanimously on June 16 to dissolve the legislature and schedule preterm parliamentary elections for September 18, concurrently with elections for the new Russian State Duma and for the post of Chechen Republic head. Both Daudov and acting Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov adduced as the rationale for that decision the need to avoid the additional expenditure a separate parliamentary ballot would entail. The money saved could, Daudov suggested, be invested in economic development or resolving social problems. Russian commentators have cast doubt on that argument, however. Aleksei Makarkin of the Center for Political Technologies pointed out that since the outgoing parliament was elected in September 2013 for a five-year term, it would have been equally feasible to save money by scheduling a parliamentary ballot concurrently with the Russian presidential election due no later than March 2018, i.e. just six months early.

Russia: Russia denies DNC hack and says maybe someone ‘forgot the password’ | The Washington Post

When Russia faces uncomfortable accusations from abroad, the Kremlin normally lashes back with official declarations and scornful comments on state television. But when the Democratic National Committee and cybersecurity experts told The Washington Post that Russian government hackers had stolen an entire database of opposition research on presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, officials here met the accusations with little more than a simple denial and a shrug. “Usually these kinds of leaks take place not because hackers broke in, but, as any professional will tell you, because someone simply forgot the password or set the simple password 123456,” German Klimenko, Putin’s top Internet adviser, said in remarks carried by the RIA Novosti state news agency. “Well, it’s always simpler to explain this away as the intrigues of enemies, rather than one’s own incompetence.”

Russia: Opposition Primaries Undermined by Website Hacks | The Moscow Times

Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) has ruled the final results of the Democratic Coalition’s online primaries void after their website came under attack from hackers. Personal data belonging to thousands of opposition voters was leaked online after the coalition’s website was targeted. The CEC ruled that it was impossible to establish any final results. “Due to external access to the server resulting in the unauthorized collection of data, the CEC believes it was impossible to continue safe and reliable voting procedures in these primaries,” said the Electoral Commission in a statement posted on the VKontakte page of the PARNAS opposition party. The hackers gained access to voters’ names, dates of birth, email addresses and phone numbers. The information, which was later released online, also contained account passwords and information on cast ballots.

Russia: Meet the woman who says she’s going to fix Russia’s rigged elections | The Washington Post

From the fringes of power, Ella Pamfilova has spent decades fighting against the odds. As Russia’s first female candidate for president, she ran on a largely symbolic ticket against Vladimir Putin in 2000, earning just 1 percent of the vote. As Russia’s human rights ombudsman, she sought compromise between harried advocates and hidebound officials. But as the newly appointed head of Russia’s Central Elections Commission, she faces an even more improbable task: ensuring that Russia’s notorious parliamentary elections this fall are free and fair. The stakes are high. Russia’s most recent parliamentary elections, in 2011, descended into farce as social media videos of ballot stuffing and accusations of mass voter fraud spawned the country’s largest pro-democracy and anti-Putin rallies in recent memory. The difference now, Pamfilova said in an interview, is that Putin has given a mandate for clean elections. And she says she is the proof.

Russia: Kerelia Cancels Elections, Ousts Mayor, Reinstates Elections | The Moscow Times

Regional deputies in Russia’s republic of Karelia have passed the first reading of a bill to reinstate mayoral elections in the region’s cities after they were canceled last year, the Kommersant newspaper reported Thursday. City council deputies in Petrozavodsk, the region’s capital, ousted Mayor Galina Shirshina from office after canceling mayoral elections in the republic. Petrozavodsk was one of the few Russian cities with an elected mayor not from the ruling United Russia party. The small, industrial city, built on the shores of Lake Onezhskoye, had hosted a battle between its opposition mayor and its legislative assembly.

Russia: Election Watchdog Fined as Part of ‘Intimidation Campaign’ | The Moscow Times

A Moscow city court has fined election monitoring group Golos 1.2 million rubles ($18,000) for failing to identify itself as a “foreign agent” on its website. Rights activists said the verdict was part of an intimidation campaign ahead of parliamentary elections, the RBC news website reported Monday. Under a Russian law signed by President Vladimir Putin in 2012, non-governmental organizations that receive funding from abroad and are engaged in any perceived ‘political’ activities must register as “foreign agents” and identify themselves as such in all publications.

Russia: As elections loom, Kremlin applies ‘ethical standards’ to muzzle critics | CS Monitor

Since she was elected to the parliament of the Russian region of Kursk five years ago, Olga Li has been a major challenge to local authorities. Among other things, she has been instrumental in bringing charges of corruption against several leading local officials. She has publicly spoken out on dwindling economic opportunities in the important industrial region. The newspaper where she serves as editor, Narodni Zhurnalist, keeps up a steady drumbeat of criticism, and she seems able to bring hundreds of supporters onto the streets to support her political campaigning. Ms. Li even issued a widely viewed YouTube appeal to President Vladimir Putin, in which she claimed state institutions were being run like “criminal enterprises,” blamed the Kremlin for being “indifferent to the fate of millions” of increasingly impoverished citizens, and questioned the annexation of Crimea.

Russia: Ex-rights ombudsman named Russia’s election chief ahead of polls | APP

Russia’s former human rights ombudsman Ella Pamfilova was on Monday appointed the country’s top elections chief ahead of parliamentary polls this year. Her candidacy was approved by the majority of members of the central election commission.Russia will hold parliamentary elections this September amid a prolonged economic crisis due in part to the fall in oil prices and Western sanctions over the Kremlin’s role in Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin earlier this month dropped the controversial chief of the election commission Vladimir Churov dubbed the “magician” by the marginalised opposition.

Russia: Putin Changes September Election Rules To Prop Up His ‘United Russia’ Party | Forbes

The September 18 Russian parliamentary elections will take place amidst a deep economic crisis, with oil at $30 a barrel, and with election rules deliberately designed to blunt and conceal voter disaffection. The Putin regime incurs risks with this strategy because it creates an opportunity for political forces to emerge that actually address the deep concerns of the people. It is virtually impossible for the scheming Putin to know from whence such a threat will come. Russia’s last parliamentary election (December 2011) sent tens of thousands of protesters into the streets calling for “Russia without Putin,” in outrage over the flagrant election fraud on the part of Putin’s United Russia (dubbed the “party of crooks and thieves”). The demonstrations shook Putin, who responded by cracking down hard on dissent.

Russia: Putin’s ex-pm, facing death threats, warns of vote crackdown | Bloomberg

The Kremlin is putting “unprecedented” pressure on opposition activists as President Vladimir Putin prepares for his toughest electoral test amid Russia’s longest recession in two decades, according to his former prime minister. “The authorities understand that 2016 will be decisive because the economic and political situation is acute,” Mikhail Kasyanov, who was premier from 2000 to 2004 and is now one of Putin’s harshest critics, said in an interview in Moscow. “They are tightening the screws, and if they don’t allow the opposition to engage in politics and compete in elections, all this will soon lead to a revolution.” Kasyanov said pro-Kremlin activists are hounding him and supporters of his opposition Parnas coalition across the country ahead of parliamentary elections in September. He’s also facing death threats, including an Instagram video posted last month by the Kremlin-backed leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, that showed him in the crosshairs of a scope sight. Kadyrov later added a picture of himself with a sniper rifle.