Dead Drop: July 7

WHERE’S WALDO? AND YEVGENY AND VLADIMIR, FOR THAT MATTER:  One of the great guessing games over the past couple weeks, has been what is the over-under on the life expectancy of failed mutineer Yevgeny Prigozhin. Part of answering that question requires figuring out exactly where he is.  The consensus has been that wherever he is, Putin’s chef’s goose is pretty much cooked. But there has also been wonderment about why the Kremlin has yet to put a fork in him.  There have been confusing reports that suggest that airplanes associated with Prigozhin seem to be freely flying around Russia –and sometimes between Russia and Belarus.  Then, there were some stories about a helicopter landing in his hometown of St. Petersburg bearing a passenger who looked very much like Prigozhin.  But then, close up photos of the man seemed to show that he possessed a fist full of fingers – and Prigozhin famously is known to be missing part of one finger.  Unless this photo was digitally altered – perhaps the man pictured was not the chef.  And on Thursday, Belurus leader Aleksandr Lukashenko said don’t look for Prigozhin here…he is back in Russia. Keep in mind, if Prigozhin shows up in your neighborhood, the FBI has been offering a $250K reward for information leading to his arrest for more than five years now. The charges stem from alleged interference in the US 2016 presidential election and not for the mutinous march on Moscow.  (Important note to our Russian and Belarusian readers: to earn the reward, Prigozhin must be captured alive and made available to the FBI.)  And, then there is the question of Putin’s whereabouts. Since the start of the pandemic, the Russian leader had notoriously not been a man of the people – stationing himself at the end of very long, empty tables. But now, there are images of him showing up in public around Russia, sometimes plunging into adoring crowds and even kissing (on the forehead) a young female fan. But is this really Putin? Stories abound of body doubles and many of the Putins popping up appear a bit different than the puffier version of Vlad seen not long ago.

IT’S U.S. OR THEM:  New regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Defense tell filmmakers, ‘if you want Pentagon assistance in making your motion picture – we’d better not catch you caving to pressure from the Chinese government to alter the script’. There have been plenty of reports of Hollywood buckling to the dictates of Beijing when it comes to productions. (For more on this check out our Cover Stories podcast from earlier this year, about the book Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy.)  Politico reports that the new rules say the Pentagon will no longer “…provide production assistance when there is demonstrable evidence that the production has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the People’s Republic of China … to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the People’s Republic of China.”  The new regs apparently were prompted by language inserted in the 2023 defense policy bill by Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX.) A lot of attention to the subject was generated by the film “Top Gun: Maverick” in which a Taiwanese flag on Tom Cruise’s flight jacket was removed to appease Chinese concerns – and later digitally restored – but only after a Chinese investment firm, Tencent, dropped their financial backing for the flick. Of course, adding and removing flags and such is typically done in post-production – long after the filmmakers might have borrowed the Pentagon’s aircraft carriers and fighter aircraft. But Cruz control over Chinese influence on filmmaking may have started a trend.  We noticed this week, that Vietnam banned the showing of the upcoming Barbie movie in their country because the film includes a scene which features a map depicting China’s controversial (OK, bogus) claim of huge swaths of the South China Sea as Chinese territorial waters. And Senator Cruz noticed this too, saying “I guess Barbie is made in China” and slamming the movie for “pushing Chinese propaganda.”