How a dead moose has edged Russia closer to a stand-off with the West

Vladimir Putin is being accused of trying to stitch up a political rival who has been arrested and charged over the death of a moose.

Valery Rashkin, leader of the Moscow branch of Russia’s Communist Party, is facing “criminal charges of illegal hunting and the threat of losing his parliamentary seat” after being found “cutting up” a moose carcass “at night in a forest”, The Washington Post reported. Fellow Communist lawmaker Nina Ostanina told the paper that the charges were “a political special operation” that was “designed to intimidate all patriots” who oppose Putin.

Rashkin’s arrest marks a “new era of repression” in Russia, said The Economist. And this repression “will lead to confrontation with the West”, the paper predicted.

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Hunting for trouble

Rashkin has “been at odds” with the Kremlin for months after “challenging the results of September parliamentary elections and rejecting the Kremlin’s pet project, online voting, a system that critics say will promote electoral fraud”, The Washington Post reported.

Opposition lawmakers say that these political rows are behind the arrest of Moscow’s “top Communist”, the paper continued. Rashkin was detained in the middle of the night on 29 October for allegedly “shooting a female moose illegally”.

He “confirmed to local media that he was stopped by police while driving in Russia’s Saratov region with the elk carcass in his trunk”, The Guardian reported at the time. But the politician insisted that “he and a travel companion did not shoot the elk and had planned to report the animal’s death to police”.

Officers who “said they were responding to reports of shots fired in the area” were alleged to have found “two knives with traces of blood and an axe in the car”.

Rashkin was also alleged to have refused to undergo a medical examination for drink-driving, a claim that he denied. “A video leaked to several pro-Kremlin news agencies showed the MP looking unsteady as he was questioned by police,” said the paper.

The Communist told independent Russian broadcaster RTVI that officials were “turning everything upside down as though I killed the elk”, adding: “I believe this is a provocation.”

However, he then changed his story after footage aired on state television that “showed him being confronted by police” on the night of his arrest “looking confused and evasive, standing next to his car and a pile of bloody meat”, The Washington Post said.

Rashkin admitted that he had “blurted out” a lie after being confronted by the police when he was “tired”. In a videoed statement, he said that he had shot the moose after mistaking it for a wild boar, and promised to buy and release a replacement into the wild.

He “did himself no favours” with his “shifting accounts”, said the paper. But Community Party ally Ostanina argued that the effort by the Kremlin to discredit Rashkin was “so blunt and clumsy that it is baffling”.

‘Net is spreading’

Independent news site Meduza reported yesterday that the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, had recommended that “veteran” lawmaker Rashkin be stripped of his political immunity from prosecution.

The house was “expected to consider the issue” on Thursday, after “prosecutors also asked the parliament to allow for the election of a pretrial restraint that would ban Rashkin from ‘certain activities’”, added the site, which has been labelled a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin.

The charges against him carry a potential sentence of up to two years in prison.

And his prosecution would “send a message that opposition politicians, even from the tame parties permitted by the Kremlin, can face ruin if they are too outspoken”, said The Washington Post.

“In Rashkin’s case, even in terms of the crazy Russian VIP hunting, he did nothing wrong,” Konstantin Gaaze, a sociologist at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, told the paper.

“In this year and the previous year, there were a number of cases involving United Russia MPs and United Russia officials in ugly and crazy hunting episodes,” Gaaze said. “Now they’re jumping on Rashkin to show it’s not only United Russia MPs who do evil and cruel things to animals.”

Officials from Putin’s United Russia party who have been caught up in hunting-related scandals include Alexander Kramarenko, who was accused in June “of illegally slaughtering about 150 wild birds and posing with their bodies on Instagram”, The Times reported.

“To be fair”, said The Washington Post, “Rashkin’s alleged crime seems to pale” alongside Kramarenko’s “ghastly” photo.

Kramarenko, a former Russian ambassador to the UK, was “charged with similar counts of illegal hunting” after posting the image online, according to the paper. He has also been suspended from his party, but “no other information about his position has emerged”.

Meanwhile, Rashkin has been pushed into the spotlight as the Kremlin escalates the repression that “began in 2020 with the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most famous political prisoner”, said The Economist.

The country’s “relations with the West have also entered a dark period”, the paper continued. Confronted with falling approval ratings, Putin has begun deliberately “building in cold-war confrontation to his dealings with the West”.

The president justifies repression at home by “telling his people that Western policy is designed to obliterate the Russian way of life”. And “the net is spreading beyond politics”.

Sergei Zuev, head of the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Science, “the top liberal university in Russia”, was arrested on fraud charges in October. Earlier this month, the academic, “who is recovering from heart treatment, was taken from house arrest to a prison cell, perhaps to force a false confession in a fabricated case”, The Economist suggested.

A string of non-governmental organisations have also been labelled as “foreign agents”, a classification that under Russian laws, allows the Kremlin to target “individual journalists, YouTube bloggers and practically anyone else who receives money from abroad and voices a political opinion”, according to NPR.

And for Putin, “repression does not have a reverse gear”, said The Economist. His “regime depends on anti-Western ideology for its politics just as it depends on oil and gas for its prosperity” – paving the way for a new Cold War-style stand-off.