Twenty-five-year old Pegah plays music on the street, gathers with friends in the park, and dresses as she pleases — all things that were difficult or impossible in her native Iran. She fled to Georgia following repeated arrests for violating Iran’s dress code, and after she appeared in a documentary that put her on the authorities’ radar. RFE/RL’s Georgian Service spoke to Pegah about her new and sometimes difficult life in a very different culture.
Leading human rights groups in Russia have condemned the country’s role in abuses in Syria, including its participation in the bombing of civilian targets.
The condemnation comes in a 198-page report, billed as the first report on the deadly conflict by Russian rights groups, including the prominent Memorial human rights center and several other organizations.
The report includes more than 150 interviews with witnesses and survivors based in Russia, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Germany, Belgium, and other countries.
“Focusing on the plight of these civilians, we conclude that much greater responsibility for Syria’s future lies with all state parties to the conflict, Russia foremost among them,” the report says.
“The overwhelming majority of our interviewees do not see Russia as a savior, but as a destructive foreign force whose military and political intervention helped bolster the war criminal heading their country,” the report added.
“Some of the people we interviewed revealed that they or their loved ones had been victims of Russian bombings,” it said.
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The report accuses Russia of abuses in Syria, including bombing civilians indiscriminately and backing Syria’s regime, which has been accused of widespread atrocities including the use of chemical weapons.
The report calls on Moscow to conduct independent investigations into the Russian Army’s bombardments in Syria and pay compensation to victims.
The authors of the report said it was compiled mainly to present information about human rights abuses in Syria to Russian readers, where “we have the sense that Russian society is not adequately informed about this conflict in which our country has played a key role.”
Russia, along with Iran, has played a critical role in helping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad remain in power despite a 10-year conflict that has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions.
Hey, you’re busy! We know rferl.orgisn’t the only website you read. And that it’s just possible you may have missed some of our most compelling journalism this week. To make sure you’re up-to-date, here are some of the highlights produced by RFE/RL’s team of correspondents, multimedia editors, and visual journalists over the past seven days.
After Brutal Attack On Government Critic, Uzbek Ministry Blames The Victim
Miraziz Bazarov, an Uzbek rights campaigner and government critic who has defended gay rights, remains hospitalized after three masked men assaulted him on March 28. Earlier the same day, attackers disrupted a cultural group led by Bazarov, beating at least two people. In response, Uzbekistan’s Interior Ministry issued a statement saying that Bazarov had provoked the incidents with videos that “humiliate our national culture.” By RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service
After Struggles With Hungarian Schools, Mother Of Autistic Boy Launches Aid Project
Goran’s parents say he’s an advanced reader who loves learning languages. But he also has a mild form of autism associated with difficulties in social skills and communication, and his family struggled to find support for him at a Hungarian public school. His mother, Henrietta Zadori, decided to launch her own foundation to help other families navigate the same system. By RFE/RL’s Hungarian Service
As Domestic Violence Surges Amid Pandemic, Russia Targets Victims’ Support Group
Russian help lines have recorded a surge in domestic violence during the year of COVID-19 restrictions. Meanwhile, a leading organization dealing with the issue is being evicted from its premises after being declared a “foreign agent” by the authorities, who say its calls for government agencies to help protect victims constitute “political activity.” By Current Time
With relatives and supporters of imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny raising the alarm over the deterioration of his health in custody, the situation has echoes of the 2009 death in custody of tax attorney Sergei Magnitsky. Magnitsky’s death after numerous complaints that he was being denied medical care prompted the West to impose targeted sanctions against alleged human rights abusers in Russia and other countries, marking a significant shift in international diplomacy. By Robert Coalson
Uzbek Singer Warned Of Beating After Announcing Run For President
Well-known Uzbek singer Jahongir Otajonov says he was threatened with bodily harm after announcing plans to run for president of the Central Asian nation. Security-camera footage in Otajonov’s Istanbul office showed three men warning him that there was a contract out for his beating. By RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service and Stuart Greer
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Aleksei Navalny started a hunger strike in prison, while the father of a top ally of the Kremlin opponent was arrested in a move that one political analyst said echoed the Stalin era. The war in Syria passed the 10-year mark, the Kremlin tried damage control following a full-throated expression of support for Burma’s junta as it massacred protesters, and tensions rose amid fresh questions about Russia’s intentions in the Donbas.
Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.
‘Getting Worrisome’
So far in 2021, the biggest Russia news has come from inside the country — certainly since January 17, when Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny was arrested at the airport upon his return from Germany, where he spent five months in treatment after a nerve-agent poisoning he blames on President Vladimir Putin and the Federal Security Service (FSB).
Since then, events have rushed along at a rapid pace — but at the same time may seem almost like they are occurring in slow motion, a nightmare sequence that one might like to stop with the push of a button but is powerless to affect. Almost every day brings a new development that seems worse than the last, or at least equally bad.
There have been large protests, a harsh crackdown, and a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for Navalny, who charges that he is being denied adequate medical treatment in what he called a “deliberate strategy” of harm — and is essentially being tortured in his cell through sleep deprivation.
A screenshot of an Instagram post published on March 31 shows a photo of a handwritten statement in which Navalny declared a hunger strike.
On March 31, Navalny announced a hunger strike to protest his treatment, demanding that his jailers adhere to the law and that a doctor of his choice be allowed to visit him.
“I have the right to invite a doctor and to receive medicine. They are not allowing me either one,” Navalny said in an Instagram post. “The pain in my back has spread to my leg. Parts of my right and now also my left leg have lost sensation.All joking aside, this is getting worrisome.”
Another Kremlin opponent, Vladimir Kara-Murza, expressed concern in more concrete terms, writing in The Washington Post that after the nerve-agent poisoning in August, which Navalny and many others say was an assassination attempt, “the Kremlin is trying to kill him again — this time slowly, painfully and in the confinement” of the prison where he is being held.
The situation contains echoes of the fatal plight of Sergei Magnitsky, a whistle-blower whose death in jail in 2009 has played a substantial part in defining Putin’s rule and souring Russia’s relations with the West.
Navalny himself is not the only one under pressure: Many of his associates and allies across Russia have been prosecuted, mainly on administrative charges linked to the protests held in January, and jailed, fined, or placed under house arrest in what Kremlin critics say is a concerted campaign to curtail Navalny’s reach from behind bars, blunt the challenge he poses, and reduce the chances of fresh protestsahead of parliamentary elections expected in September.
‘Fathers And Sons’
Associates, allies — and also their relatives, in at least one case. On March 27, the father of Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), was detained and jailed on an abuse-of-office charge stemming from a matter related to his preretirement job as a small-town official.
Zhdanov said he had “no doubt” that the arrest of his father was Kremlin-orchestrated punishment for his own work at FBK, which has produced several investigative reports revealing evidence of high-level corruption — including an exposé, published two days before Navalny returned to Russia, on a sprawling Black Sea estate that it called “a palace for Putin.”
Yury Zhdanov, 66, faces up to four years in prison if tried and convicted. Pretrial detention puts “what remains of his health” in jeopardy, said Ivan Zhdanov, who blamed the Kremlin and said Putin’s administration had reached a “new level of villainy and turpitude.”
Pretrial detention puts “what remains of [my father’s] health” in jeopardy, says Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
The elder Zhdanov’s arrest was “in keeping with Soviet-style ‘justice,’ in which not only were parents made to pay for the ‘sins’ of their children and vice versa, but also siblings and other relatives were punished for each other’s ‘misdeeds,’” wrote Andrei Kolesnikov, head of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
“By arresting family members of persecuted individuals, today’s authorities openly declare themselves to be the direct successors of Stalin’s repressive system,” Kolesnikov wrote in an opinion article in The Moscow Times under the headline: Fathers and Sons: A Kremlin-KGB Remake.
The Kremlin’s main focus seems likely to remain on domestic events through the end of summer, given the test that United Russia — the party that serves as one of Putin’s main levers of power nationwide but is deeply unpopular — faces in the State Duma elections, which must be held by September 19.
The timing of the vote means there is little chance of a letup in the pressure on Navalny, his allies, and anyone inside Russia who is seen as threat to the Kremlin.
But there’s plenty happening beyond Russia’s borders.
For one thing, the month of March marked a decade since the start of the war in Syria — and a decade of Russian support for President Bashar al-Assad’s government in a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven millions from their homes.
Moscow’s involvement in the war is often described as having begun in September 2015, when Russia launched a campaign of air strikes targeting Assad’s foes and also stepped up its military presence on the ground, helping turn the tide in his favor when his back was against the wall.
A fresh reminder of Moscow’s role since 2015 came on March 30, when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a humanitarian aid package for Syrians in their own country and abroad.
In a statement, Blinken said that the Syrian people “have faced atrocities, including Assad regime and Russian air strikes, forced disappearances, [Islamic State] brutality, and chemical-weapons attacks.”
Aiding Assad
Concerns about Russia’s actions in Syria are mainly focused on the last half-decade as well. Among many other reports, they were underscored by an October 2019 report in The New York Times about an investigation that found that Russian pilots had bombed hospitals four times in the space of 24 hours that May.
But Moscow has been behind Assad since the war started in 2011 with a government crackdown on protests, lending him military support — albeit on a smaller scale before 2015 — and crucial diplomatic backing in the UN Security Council and other forums.
Moscow’s backing for Assad — not to mention Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, and others — might make a recent incident in Burma seem unsurprising. But the timing was such that the Kremlin, which rarely if ever admits to much of anything, let alone apologizes, appears to have felt the need to distance itself in this case.
Visiting Burma to mark the Southeast Asian country’s Armed Forces Day, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Aleksandr Fomin met on March 26 with General Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of the junta that took over after a military coup on February 1.
Fomin called Burma a reliable ally and strategic partner and said that Russia “is committed to a strategy aimed at bolstering relations between the two countries.”
Russian Deputy Defense Minister Aleksandr Fomin meets with Burmese military officials on March 26.
The following day, the junta chief called Russia a “true friend” — and, amidst lavish cerebrations of Armed Forces Day, security forces killed 114 people, according to local media, in the deadliest violence since mainly peaceful protests erupted after the military coup.
Even given Russia’s other relationships, the Kremlin’s tendency to shrug off accusations of violating human rights at home or condoning such actions abroad, the military official’s visit left observers wondering what the Russian state thought it had to gain with an expression of strong support for the junta amid the bloodshed.
‘Really Worried’
In any case, the Kremlin climbed down — or sought to soften the damage to its image amid outrage over the deadly violence — two days later.
“We are really worried by the growing number of civilian casualties,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters in a regular phone briefing with Russian and foreign media outlets. “It is a source of deep concern and we are following the unfolding situation in [Burma] really closely.”
Peskov, Putin, and other Russian officials have also voiced concern about the prospect of a new flare-up in the seven-year-old war in eastern Ukraine, where Moscow has given military, political, and financial backing to anti-Kyiv forces who have held parts of two provinces in the region known as the Donbas.
The sincerity of such remarks has been questioned in Kyiv and the West, where an escalation of fighting in the Donbas and Russian troop maneuvers near the Ukrainian border — as well as in Russian-controlled Crimea — have sparked concern about Moscow’s intentions at a time when its ties with the United States and the European Union are severely strained.
Kyiv has accused the Russia-backed forces in the Donbas of stepping up cease-fire violations, and four Ukrainian servicemen were killed on March 26 in what the Ukrainian military said was a mortar attack — the highest single-day toll since 2019.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited the front line in the eastern Donetsk region on February 11.
The war in the Donbas has killed more than 13,000 people since April 2014, when it erupted after Russia fomented separatism across eastern and southern Ukraine and seized the Crimean Peninsula after Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was pushed from power by a pro-Western, anti-corruption protest movement known as the Maidan.
Observers are wondering whether Russia may be gearing up for a new offensive in Ukraine or sending signals to the West, making a show of force to warn Washington and the EU against imposing new sanctions or other forms of pressure on Russia over its treatment of Navalny and other issues.
That seems to be just what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was doing — sending a signal, a warning, a threat — when he said on April 1, quoting what he described as remarks by Putin, that “anyone who tried to start a new war in the Donbas will destroy Ukraine.”
Putin spokesman Peskov, commenting on the reported movements of Russian military forces near the Ukrainian border and in Crimea, said that Russia “moves its troops within its own territory as it sees fit” and that these movements “pose no threat to anyone.”
“That’s not exactly going to assure anyone,” Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on Twitter.
The Armenian parliament has adopted changes to the country’s Electoral Code that the opposition says are aimed at helping Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian win snap elections expected in June.
The amendments, announced on March 24 by Pashinian, whose My Step faction dominates the National Assembly, will switch the Caucasus country’s electoral system to a fully proportional one.
Armenians have until now voted for parties and alliances as well as individual candidates. In the last two general elections, parliament seats were equally distributed among candidates picked through national party lists and individual races.
The amendments adopted on April 1 mean that the next election will be held only on a proportional, party-list basis. Only by pro-government lawmakers voted for the changes.
No one from the opposition faction Bright Armenia participated in the vote, while lawmakers from the opposition Prosperous Armenia faction boycotted the parliamentary meeting.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian (file photo)
Following talks with the opposition, Pashinian on March 18 agreed to hold early general elections on June 20 in an effort to defuse a political crisis sparked by a war late last year with Azerbaijan over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Armenia has been in the grip of political upheaval since November, when Pashinian signed a Moscow-brokered cease-fire agreement with Azerbaijan that ended six weeks of fighting in and around Nagorno-Karabakh.
Under the deal, a chunk of Nagorno-Karabakh and all seven districts around it were placed under Azerbaijani administration after almost 30 years of control by ethnic Armenian forces.
The opposition held demonstrations in a bid to force Pashinian to step down over his handling of the war, during which more than 6,000 people were killed.
But the prime minister, whose My Step faction dominates parliament, has refused to resign, agreeing to early elections instead.
The European Union says Iran and a group of world powers will hold virtual talks on April 2 about the possible return of the United States to a landmark 2015 nuclear deal.
The move was welcomed by Washington, which said it was ready to take “mutual steps” to return to the nuclear deal.
The virtual meeting will be attended by representatives of China, France, Germany, Russia, Britain, and Iran — all signatories of the agreement — the EU said in a statement released on April 1.
“Participants will discuss the prospect of a possible return of the United States to the” landmark nuclear deal and “how to ensure the full and effective implementation of the agreement by all sides.”
The U.S. State department on April 1 welcomed the announcement of the meeting.
“We obviously welcome this as a positive step,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters, adding that the United States was in discussions on “initial mutual steps” to restore full compliance with the 2015 accord.
The deal was meant to provide relief for Iran from international sanctions in exchange for limitations on its nuclear program, which Tehran says is strictly for civilian energy purposes.
But the United States unilaterally pulled out of nuclear agreement in 2018 under former President Donald Trump, who reimposed crippling economic sanctions on Tehran.
U.S. President Joe Biden has signaled his readiness to revive the accord, but his administration insists Iran must first return to its nuclear commitments, most of which Tehran has suspended in response to U.S. sanctions.
Iran’s commitments include limits on the amount of enriched uranium it can stockpile and the purity to which it can enrich it.
Iran began restricting International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections of its nuclear facilities in February.
On March 21, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Washington must lift all sanctions if the United States and its allies want to see Iran return to its commitments under the deal.
The announcement of the virtual meeting came as a report by the IAEA said that Iran had breached more of its commitments.
The confidential report, obtained by Reuters and dated March 31, said Iran had begun enriching uranium using advanced machines at its underground Natanz plant, in violation of the agreement.
The European Union has accused Moscow of launching a “conscription campaign” in the Russia-controlled Ukrainian region of Crimea, in a move that the bloc said violated international law.
The EU’s strongly worded statement came as Ukraine accused Russia of massing troops near their shared border, an accusation rejected by the Kremlin.
“Today, the Russian Federation has launched yet another conscription campaign in the illegally-annexed Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to draft residents of the peninsula in the Russian Federation Armed Forces,” the EU said in a statement on April 1.
Observers noted that Russia has in the past conducted military call-ups in the springtime.
The bloc said the Russian military conscription drive in Crimea was “another violation of international humanitarian law.”
It stressed that “the Russian Federation is bound by international law, and obliged to ensure the protection of human rights on the peninsula” and reiterated “the EU does not and will not recognize the illegal annexation” of Crimea.
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by the international community after Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted amid a wave of public protests.
Moscow also backs separatists in a war against Ukrainian government forces that has killed more than 13,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.
The EU has imposed several rounds of sanctions on individuals and entities accused of undermining Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif took to the new Clubhouse social media app on March 31 to defend Tehran’s controversial recent strategic cooperation pact with China — a deal criticized for lacking transparency and “selling out to China” amid crushing U.S. sanctions.
In past days, small scattered protests against the 25-year China deal have been reported in Tehran and several other Iranian cities — with protesters warning that “Iran is not for sale.”
Zarif’s use of Clubhouse, an audio-based social media application, is seen as a way to counter those critics in Iran and abroad.
Zarif, a prolific Twitter user with a significant following on Instagram, said in his Clubhouse message that he was in discussions with Chinese officials to release details about the agreement.
He described the deal as a road map for relations between Tehran and Beijing. Zarif also noted that China has not published details of similar agreements Beijing has reached with other countries.
An 18-page document leaked online in 2020 outlined future cooperation between the countries, including Chinese investment in Iran’s energy sector.
Zarif said that, despite the agreement, there are still “barriers” that make it difficult for Iran to “look to the East” and expand ties with China and other countries.
He said those obstacles include ongoing U.S. sanctions and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) — an international financial crime watchdog that Iran has failed to comply with.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has offered to resume negotiations over a 2015 nuclear deal, which President Donald Trump withdrew from while imposing sanctions.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (file photo)
But Tehran has rejected direct talks with U.S. officials and has called for the removal of all sanctions.
“I don’t believe in the [policy] of looking to the East or the West,” Zarif said on Clubhouse, adding that Iran’s foreign policy should be balanced and engaged with the whole world.
Disillusioned Iranians
Zarif’s decision to join Clubhouse highlighted the growing popularity of the social media application in Iran.
In recent weeks, Iranians have joined discussions in virtual “rooms” about diverse issues that have included the country’s June presidential election.
Critics say Iranian authorities are using Clubhouse to present the appearance of free debate and to encourage increasingly disillusioned Iranians to vote.
Iranian Clubhouse talks have usually been attended by a few hundred people to as many as 2,000.
But Zarif’s presentation quickly attracted the maximum number of 8,000 listeners in the virtual “room.”
The moderator of the discussion with Zarif was later quoted as saying that officials had agreed to participate in the discussion under the condition that reporters with Persian-language media based outside of Iran would not be allowed to ask questions.
Also using the app during Zarif’s presentation were Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh and Iran’s Minister of Information and Technology Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi.
Reporters with the Persian Service of the BBC and others confirmed that they were not called upon to ask questions even though they had signaled that they wanted to ask questions.
During the discussion, Zarif reiterated that he is not planning to run as a candidate for president in June – an election which comes amid a power struggle between moderate and hard-line factions of the Iranian establishment.
Following the discussion, some observers inside Iran suggested that hard-liners could push for filtering the Clubhouse app to prevent moderates and reformists from using it ahead of the vote.
One drawback for Iranian users of the Clubhouse social media app has been its availability only for those with an iPhone. (illustrative photo)
Others, however, said that banning Clubhouse could turn away potential voters.
Zarif said that neither he nor Iran’s information minister support the idea of filtering, “nor do we have the power to filter.”
Twitter and Facebook are already filtered in Iran. Hard-liners have made calls for the blocking of the popular Instagram.
Despite such restrictions, Iranians continue to use banned social media and websites via anti-filtering tools.
Numerous Discussions
Iranian activists and journalists have in past weeks organized numerous discussions on Clubhouse on issues such as the mandatory Hijab law — which requires women to cover themselves in public.
Iran’s use of solitary confinement against political prisoners has also been a topic on the new social media app.
There have also been discussions with human rights advocates, including Narges Mohammadi and politicians like former Interior Ministry official Mostafa Tajzadeh.
But the June presidential election has so far garnered little interest among ordinary Iranians who are struggling to make ends meet amid a deteriorating economy.
Earlier this week, former oil minister and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commander Rostam Ghasemi, a potential presidential candidate, joined a Clubhouse discussion where he answered questions from participants — including a reporter with RFE/RL’s Radio Farda.
The Clubhouse virtual “rooms” have brought together Iranians from inside and outside the country, including those from opposing political sides, reformists, and advocates of regime change.
One drawback to the social media app has been its availability only for those with an iPhone. That has limited the number of Iranians inside the country who can join.
Zarif said he joined Clubhouse with an Android phone, saying he used beta software that allows Android owners to use it.
Eghtesadonline.com predicted recently that the number of Iranians using Clubhouse could increase significantly if the social media application became available for Android phones — the type of devices used by the majority of Iranian cell phone users.
Moldovan President Maia Sandu has said that almost 700 doses of COVID-19 vaccines intended for health-care workers and the critically vulnerable have instead been diverted to public officials and family members, including employees of the Defense Ministry and regional authorities,
“A first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech has been given to 688 people in the ‘relatives’ category,” Sandu told Moldova’s Jurnal TV on March 31.
Moldova, one of Europe’s poorest countries, has lagged behind the rest of the continent in the vaccination campaign and welcomed donations from friendly governments.
The first batch of 14,400 doses of Pfizer vaccines from the global COVAX scheme arrived in Moldova last month. So far, the country of 4.5 million has received 110,970 doses of various vaccines.
Sandu said Health Ministry data showed that doses went to hundreds of ineligible people from the Defense Ministry, regional officials’ relatives, and even doctors’ families.
“This is shameful and it discourages our efforts to obtain more vaccine donations from abroad,” Sandu said.
Moldovan President Maia Sandu (file photo0
The Defense Ministry in a statement on April 1 rejected the accusation, calling it an “erroneous data interpretation,” and arguing that the people inoculated under the “other personnel” category in the Health Ministry records are actually health workers from military units.
Moldova’s Health Ministry said on April 1 that it would check information that regional authorities and their relatives were jumping the queue.
Ninel Revenco, an official at the national vaccination campaign, said the health ministry had established a commission to investigate possible violations.
“The Health Ministry launched an investigation to determine if there were irregularities in the vaccination process. For this, the lists of all vaccinated will be checked,” Revenco told a news conference, without providing details of violations.
Local media reported that out-of-order vaccinations occurred in the northern town of Edinet and in Cantemir in the southern part of Moldova.
Moldova started vaccinations on March 2 and so far around 40,000 medical workers and doctors have received a first shot.
The country sandwiched between EU member Romania and Ukraine has reported 230,241 coronavirus cases and 4,960 deaths so far.
With reporting by Reuters, RFE/RL’s Moldovan Service, unimedia.md, and news.yam.md
MOSCOW — Milana Magomedova is a 22-year-old woman who, until recently, lived with her parents and younger brother and sister in the Siberian oil city of Tyumen.
Since December, Magomedova has been trying to escape her parents, natives of the North Caucasus region of Daghestan who ran their family life according to a strict interpretation of their region’s traditional Islamic values.
Magomedova was not allowed to have a job or to leave the house without permission. Her parents were avidly attempting to arrange a marriage for her. Last year, she decided to leave the dental institute where her parents had sent her to study, she told RFE/RL. She knew there would be a scandal when she got home, and she was right. Her father struck her, she recalled, and threatened to send her back to his native village in Daghestan to live with relatives, who, he assured her, would see to it that she got no education at all.
“I just wanted to get a job as a cashier or something, but they wouldn’t let me,” she said. “Because of the whole situation, I had no friends except for one girlfriend. Who would want to be friends with someone who can’t leave the house? I started to understand that there was no point in sitting there any longer. I had to run away.”
The Russian authorities have long turned a blind eye to the human rights issues presented by many of the customs of the North Caucasus.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, adjacent to Daghestan, has been frequently accused by domestic and international rights groups of overseeing massive human rights abuses including abductions, torture, extrajudicial killings, the persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and political and personal assassinations. Kadyrov himself routinely berates and humiliates critics in the media, compelling them from fear to apologize.
‘Tip Of The Iceberg’
According to a 2018 report by the Dutch NGO Stichting Justice Initiative, there were at least 33 cases of so-called honor killings in the Russian North Caucasus between 2008 and 2017. Of the 39 victims, 36 were female.
“Most of the victims were daughters, sisters, wives, cousins or stepdaughters of their killers,” the report said. Only 14 of the incidents led to criminal prosecutions, producing 13 convictions and prison sentences ranging between six and 15 years.
“But this is just the tip of the iceberg,” the report added. “In reality, only a small portion of such crimes ever become known and are taken up by law enforcement and the media.” Most cases are dismissed by local authorities as “accidents.”
Toward the end of last year, Magomedova became acquainted via the Internet with Vladislav Khorev, a 32-year-old man from Ufa in the Bashkortostan region. After hearing of her plight, Khorev decided to help her escape, and he flew to Tyumen at the end of December. Shortly after New Year’s, Magomedova gathered a few belongings and the pair flew off, first to Moscow and then on to Turkey, which was one of the few countries open to Russians because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vladislav Khorev and Milana Magomedova in Istanbul.
After a few days in Istanbul, the pair traveled to St. Petersburg, where Khorev helped Magomedova rent an apartment. She was almost immediately contacted by the police, who informed her that her parents had filed a missing person report about her in Tyumen. As Magomedova later found out, a police source in Tyumen gave her address to her parents and, on January 18, her mother, Gyulliser Magomedova, appeared at her door. Later that night, her father, Musa Magomedov, showed up, and the couple tried to take her away by force. RFE/RL has heard an audio recording of the encounter, during which Magomedov struck his daughter.
During the conflict, Magomedova was able to contact Khorev, who called the police. When they arrived, they supposedly found nothing out of order. Khorev watched from the street as Magomedova was put into a waiting car (he photographed the car and shared the photo with RFE/RL). He followed them to another address and again called the police. When they arrived, they took everyone, including Khorev, to a police station.
“At the police station, they first listened to my father because he refused to leave me alone,” Magomedova said. “Then they spoke to me. I told them my side of the story and they said, ‘OK, so you are so independent, but you don’t understand that [Khorev] is a human trafficker.’”
Passport Seized
She said that they asked in detail about her relationship with Khorev. She told them that she had looked through his phone and his computer, that she had taken photocopies of his identification documents. She assured them that she did not owe Khorev any money.
“Finally, I added that even if he is a human trafficker, I didn’t want to go back with my parents,” she said. “I asked them to accept my complaint that they were trying to take me away by force. And one of them said to me, ‘Milana, don’t you understand that is your custom?’”
Vladislav Khorev,
Khorev told RFE/RL that he was questioned by an officer of the Interior Ministry’s Center E, which combats extremism and terrorism. Khorev had been holding Magomedova’s passport at her request, he said, to prevent her parents from taking it.
The police, however, found this suspicious and ordered him to give it to them.
In the end, the St. Petersburg police gave turned Magomedova and her documents over to her parents and allowed them to take her back to Tyumen.
“When I arrived home, I thought we would have some sort of conversation, that they would ask me what had happened,” Magomedova recalled. “But they started immediately threatening me, saying that if I ran away again, they would send me to Daghestan and there I would have no education or anything else. They said I had shamed them and had deprived myself…of any future.”
“My aunt, my father’s sister, told me that if they take me to Daghestan, I could easily be killed,” Magomedova said. “That no one there would remember anything about me, that everything would be dismissed as an accident, that no one would look into anything. She said that there are special cemeteries there for my type. I thought I knew my parents, but I never imagined that they would threaten to kill me or have me committed to a mental hospital.”
In order to calm her parents, Magomedova acted contrite, promised that she wouldn’t run away again, and began seeing a therapist to “calm her nerves.” But on February 10, she ran away a second time, in her pajamas and without her telephone or any money. Khorev was able to help her travel to Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, where she contacted human rights lawyer Fyodor Akchermyshev. He applied to the regional office of the Interior Ministry and was able to have Magomedova removed from the missing person’s list.
Her parents, however, did not give up. They filed complaint after complaint with the police in Tyumen. Somehow, her file from Yekaterinburg ended up with the police in Tyumen, who passed the information on to Magomedova’s parents. They began calling Akchermyshev and urging him to stop helping their daughter, saying that she was mentally ill. They also began calling Khorev.
Magomedova said she has a distant relative named Shamil Radzhabov who works for the Interior Ministry in Tyumen. Some of her acquaintances told her that they had been questioned by Radzhabov about her disappearance. She suspects he could be leaking her personal information to her parents.
She told RFE/RL that when she and Akchermyshev went to the police in Yekaterinburg to file a second complaint, they were told that her mother had visited the address that Magomedova had written on the first complaint and found no one there. Magomedova had written an incorrect address because she did not want to reveal her whereabouts.
‘Physical Force’
Magomedova’s parents filed a complaint saying that Khorev had kidnapped their daughter. But when police searched his apartment and questioned him, they found nothing incriminating. Her parents then filed a similar complaint about Akchermyshev.
In an interview with RFE/RL, Magomedova’s mother repeated her unsubstantiated allegations, saying that her daughter had been kidnapped, first by Khorev and then by Akchermyshev, in order to be sold as a prostitute to the militant group Islamic State, which is classified in Russia as a terrorist organization.
On March 23, Magomedova and Akchermyshev arrived at the office of the migration service to pick up her replacement passport. Although everyone else in line simply waited and then was handed the prepared document, Magomedova was told that she would have to wait longer because a stamp was missing.
“We understood that they were calling the police,” she said. When the police arrived, the two were taken to a a precinct house and questioned again about the accusation that Akchermyshev had kidnapped her.
During the questioning, a man Magomedova did not know entered the room. The officers did nothing while the man ushered Akchermyshev out and continued questioning Magomedova. Meanwhile, Akchermyshev was able to telephone journalists, telling them that the unknown man had used “physical force” against him in front of police officers.
Fyodor Akchermyshev says he has identified the man who accosted him at the police station as a senior officer of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Interior Ministry named Magomedimin Kurbanov (left).
Local journalists arrived at the station and found cars parked outside with license plates from Daghestan and Tyumen. Police informed Magomedova that her mother wanted to talk to her, but she refused.
After the journalists began photographing the cars and the people in them, they drove away. Magomedova and Akchermyshev were released after spending five hours at the police station.
Two days later, Akchermyshev said that he was able to identify the man who accosted him at the police station as a senior officer of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Interior Ministry named Magomedimin Kurbanov. He told RFE/RL that he has filed a complaint against Kurbanov with the Sverdlovsk police and the Investigative Committee.
“I never did get my passport,” Magomedova told RFE/RL. “I don’t know what will happen next. I think I’ll just lay low – it is terrifying just to go outside.”
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting from Moscow by RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Sergei Khazov-Cassia
MOSCOW — Milana Magomedova is a 22-year-old woman who, until recently, lived with her parents and younger brother and sister in the Siberian oil city of Tyumen.
Since December, Magomedova has been trying to escape her parents, natives of the North Caucasus region of Daghestan who ran their family life according to a strict interpretation of their region’s traditional Islamic values.
Magomedova was not allowed to have a job or to leave the house without permission. Her parents were avidly attempting to arrange a marriage for her. Last year, she decided to leave the dental institute where her parents had sent her to study, she told RFE/RL. She knew there would be a scandal when she got home, and she was right. Her father struck her, she recalled, and threatened to send her back to his native village in Daghestan to live with relatives, who, he assured her, would see to it that she got no education at all.
“I just wanted to get a job as a cashier or something, but they wouldn’t let me,” she said. “Because of the whole situation, I had no friends except for one girlfriend. Who would want to be friends with someone who can’t leave the house? I started to understand that there was no point in sitting there any longer. I had to run away.”
The Russian authorities have long turned a blind eye to the human rights issues presented by many of the customs of the North Caucasus.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, adjacent to Daghestan, has been frequently accused by domestic and international rights groups of overseeing massive human rights abuses including abductions, torture, extrajudicial killings, the persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and political and personal assassinations. Kadyrov himself routinely berates and humiliates critics in the media, compelling them from fear to apologize.
‘Tip Of The Iceberg’
According to a 2018 report by the Dutch NGO Stichting Justice Initiative, there were at least 33 cases of so-called honor killings in the Russian North Caucasus between 2008 and 2017. Of the 39 victims, 36 were female.
“Most of the victims were daughters, sisters, wives, cousins or stepdaughters of their killers,” the report said. Only 14 of the incidents led to criminal prosecutions, producing 13 convictions and prison sentences ranging between six and 15 years.
“But this is just the tip of the iceberg,” the report added. “In reality, only a small portion of such crimes ever become known and are taken up by law enforcement and the media.” Most cases are dismissed by local authorities as “accidents.”
Toward the end of last year, Magomedova became acquainted via the Internet with Vladislav Khorev, a 32-year-old man from Ufa in the Bashkortostan region. After hearing of her plight, Khorev decided to help her escape, and he flew to Tyumen at the end of December. Shortly after New Year’s, Magomedova gathered a few belongings and the pair flew off, first to Moscow and then on to Turkey, which was one of the few countries open to Russians because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vladislav Khorev and Milana Magomedova in Istanbul
After a few days in Istanbul, the pair traveled to St. Petersburg, where Khorev helped Magomedova rent an apartment. She was almost immediately contacted by the police, who informed her that her parents had filed a missing person report about her in Tyumen. As Magomedova later found out, a police source in Tyumen gave her address to her parents and, on January 18, her mother, Gyulliser Magomedova, appeared at her door. Later that night, her father, Musa Magomedov, showed up, and the couple tried to take her away by force. RFE/RL has heard an audio recording of the encounter, during which Magomedov struck his daughter.
During the conflict, Magomedova was able to contact Khorev, who called the police. When they arrived, they supposedly found nothing out of order. Khorev watched from the street as Magomedova was put into a waiting car (he photographed the car and shared the photo with RFE/RL). He followed them to another address and again called the police. When they arrived, they took everyone, including Khorev, to a police station.
“At the police station, they first listened to my father because he refused to leave me alone,” Magomedova said. “Then they spoke to me. I told them my side of the story and they said, ‘OK, so you are so independent, but you don’t understand that [Khorev] is a human trafficker.’”
Passport Seized
She said that they asked in detail about her relationship with Khorev. She told them that she had looked through his phone and his computer, that she had taken photocopies of his identification documents. She assured them that she did not owe Khorev any money.
“Finally, I added that even if he is a human trafficker, I didn’t want to go back with my parents,” she said. “I asked them to accept my complaint that they were trying to take me away by force. And one of them said to me, ‘Milana, don’t you understand that is your custom?’”
Vladislav Khorev
Khorev told RFE/RL that he was questioned by an officer of the Interior Ministry’s Center E, which combats extremism and terrorism. Khorev had been holding Magomedova’s passport at her request, he said, to prevent her parents from taking it.
The police, however, found this suspicious and ordered him to give it to them.
In the end, the St. Petersburg police gave turned Magomedova and her documents over to her parents and allowed them to take her back to Tyumen.
“When I arrived home, I thought we would have some sort of conversation, that they would ask me what had happened,” Magomedova recalled. “But they started immediately threatening me, saying that if I ran away again, they would send me to Daghestan and there I would have no education or anything else. They said I had shamed them and had deprived myself…of any future.”
“My aunt, my father’s sister, told me that if they take me to Daghestan, I could easily be killed,” Magomedova said. “That no one there would remember anything about me, that everything would be dismissed as an accident, that no one would look into anything. She said that there are special cemeteries there for my type. I thought I knew my parents, but I never imagined that they would threaten to kill me or have me committed to a mental hospital.”
In order to calm her parents, Magomedova acted contrite, promised that she wouldn’t run away again, and began seeing a therapist to “calm her nerves.” But on February 10, she ran away a second time, in her pajamas and without her telephone or any money. Khorev was able to help her travel to Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, where she contacted human rights lawyer Fyodor Akchermyshev. He applied to the regional office of the Interior Ministry and was able to have Magomedova removed from the missing person’s list.
Her parents, however, did not give up. They filed complaint after complaint with the police in Tyumen. Somehow, her file from Yekaterinburg ended up with the police in Tyumen, who passed the information on to Magomedova’s parents. They began calling Akchermyshev and urging him to stop helping their daughter, saying that she was mentally ill. They also began calling Khorev.
Magomedova said she has a distant relative named Shamil Radzhabov who works for the Interior Ministry in Tyumen. Some of her acquaintances told her that they had been questioned by Radzhabov about her disappearance. She suspects he could be leaking her personal information to her parents.
She told RFE/RL that when she and Akchermyshev went to the police in Yekaterinburg to file a second complaint, they were told that her mother had visited the address that Magomedova had written on the first complaint and found no one there. Magomedova had written an incorrect address because she did not want to reveal her whereabouts.
‘Physical Force’
Magomedova’s parents filed a complaint saying that Khorev had kidnapped their daughter. But when police searched his apartment and questioned him, they found nothing incriminating. Her parents then filed a similar complaint about Akchermyshev.
In an interview with RFE/RL, Magomedova’s mother repeated her unsubstantiated allegations, saying that her daughter had been kidnapped, first by Khorev and then by Akchermyshev, in order to be sold as a prostitute to the militant group Islamic State, which is classified in Russia as a terrorist organization.
On March 23, Magomedova and Akchermyshev arrived at the office of the migration service to pick up her replacement passport. Although everyone else in line simply waited and then was handed the prepared document, Magomedova was told that she would have to wait longer because a stamp was missing.
“We understood that they were calling the police,” she said. When the police arrived, the two were taken to a a precinct house and questioned again about the accusation that Akchermyshev had kidnapped her.
During the questioning, a man Magomedova did not know entered the room. The officers did nothing while the man ushered Akchermyshev out and continued questioning Magomedova. Meanwhile, Akchermyshev was able to telephone journalists, telling them that the unknown man had used “physical force” against him in front of police officers.
Fyodor Akchermyshev says he has identified the man who accosted him at the police station as a senior officer of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Interior Ministry named Magomedimin Kurbanov (left).
Local journalists arrived at the station and found cars parked outside with license plates from Daghestan and Tyumen. Police informed Magomedova that her mother wanted to talk to her, but she refused.
After the journalists began photographing the cars and the people in them, they drove away. Magomedova and Akchermyshev were released after spending five hours at the police station.
Two days later, Akchermyshev said that he was able to identify the man who accosted him at the police station as a senior officer of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Interior Ministry named Magomedimin Kurbanov. He told RFE/RL that he has filed a complaint against Kurbanov with the Sverdlovsk police and the Investigative Committee.
“I never did get my passport,” Magomedova told RFE/RL. “I don’t know what will happen next. I think I’ll just lay low – it is terrifying just to go outside.”
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting from Moscow by RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Sergei Khazov-Cassia
Russia’s prison authority on April 1 rejected accusations of mistreatment of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, one day after the anti-corruption campaigner and frequent Kremlin critic announced a hunger strike to protest alleged abuses in custody.
The 44-year-old Navalny has complained of medical care being withheld for serious ailments and near constant interruptions by prison guards at night to deny him sleep.
Navalny was quickly taken into custody at a Moscow airport in January after recovering abroad from a nerve-agent poisoning in Russia that Western countries and international rights groups have linked to the Russian state.
Now, the prison service for Correctional Colony No. 2 outside Moscow where Navalny is serving a sentence widely viewed as politically motivated has been quoted as saying guards were following guidelines to respect inmates’ sleep and that Navalny was getting medical care.
“Correction facility officers strictly respect the right of all inmates to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep,” Reuters quoted prison authorities as saying late on March 31. It said safeguards included visual checks at night.
“These measures do not interfere with convicts resting,” it added. “…Navalny is being provided with all necessary medical care in accordance with his current medical conditions.”
But doctors who are trusted by Navalny’s close associates have been standing by helplessly, urging authorities to respond to appeals for Navalny’s care.
Navalny this week declared a hunger strike in a handwritten note to lawyers, saying he was being deprived of proper medical treatment as fear among his associates mounted over his state of health just months after being in a coma following the poison attack.
Last week, he said he had received nothing more from prison doctors than ibuprofen, despite being in acute pain from leg and back ailments.
In an Instagram post on March 31, he said the pain had worsened and that he had lost some sensitivity in both legs. He also said he was being awakened up to eight times a night.
“I have the right to call a doctor and get medicine. They don’t give me either one or the other,” he said in the post, which was published through his lawyers.
“I have declared a hunger strike demanding that the law be upheld and a doctor of my choice be allowed to visit me…. So I’m lying here, hungry, but still with two legs.”
U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said on March 31 that the United States and its allies and partners have continually called for Navalny’s release and will continue to seek to hold accountable those who are responsible for his detention and attempts on his life.
“We’ve been very clear that Aleksei Navalny is a political prisoner,” Price said at a briefing. “His detention is politically motivated.”
Hundreds of Russian physicians on March 29 demanded authorities provide immediate medical assistance to Navalny amid the growing concerns.
Navalny’s incarceration after his return from Berlin in mid-January despite clear warnings from Russian officials sparked major protests around the country.
Navalny has said the assassination attempt by poisoning that forced doctors to put him into a medically induced coma for several weeks was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin — an allegation rejected by the Kremlin.
A Moscow court in February ruled that while in Germany after his medical evacuation, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an older embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His suspended 3 1/2-year sentence was converted into jail time, though the court reduced that amount to 2 1/2 years for time already served in detention.
Vladimir Pozner, a veteran TV journalist and commentator working for Russian state TV, cut short a visit to Georgia after his arrival sparked protests in Tbilisi on March 31. Pozner, accompanied by about 30 Russian journalists and celebrities was planning to celebrate his 87th birthday and stay in the country until April 3. His bus and hotel were pelted with eggs as angry crowds accused him of being a Kremlin propagandist. Russian troops have been stationed in the Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia since a five-day war between Russia and Georgia in 2008. Georgia’s opposition United National Movement criticized the government for allowing Pozner in the country. Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili condemned the protest as “uncivilized” and falling short of what he called “Georgian standards.”
TBILISI — Veteran Russian journalist and television host Vladimir Pozner has cut short a visit to Georgia to celebrate his 87th birthday after harassment from local activists and opposition groups angry over his stance on Georgian territorial integrity.
Local critics pelted Pozner’s bus with eggs, cut power to the venue hosting his feast, and accused him of being a “Kremlin propagandist” during their frenzy on March 31 and April 1.
Pozner, a dual Russian-U.S. national, reportedly left the country early on April 1, while many in his dozens-strong contingent were fined for allegedly breaking anti-pandemic restrictions as they tried to stay one step ahead of the demonstrators.
The extraordinary events prompted Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili to speak out to defend his Georgian Dream government’s decision to permit the visit, saying that Pozner had a valid negative COVID-19 test on entry and did not appear to have broken local laws aimed at opposing Russia’s military occupation of its breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Pozner was traveling in a private visit on his U.S. passport, Garibashvili said.
Garibashvili, who took power last month amid an intraparty rift, blamed the opposition National Movement and its supporters and said the incidents had “employed the most destructive force” and “damaged the international image of our country.”
Russian troops have been in Abkhazia and South Ossetia since a five-day war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 before Moscow backed those regions’ independence.
Pozner’s tormenters said they don’t want Pozner in their country and criticized Georgian Dream for allowing him to come.
In 2010, Pozner said that “Georgia lost [Abkhazia] forever” and the area “will never be Georgia’s territory again.” He also blamed Tbilisi for the situation that led to the deadly Russian-Georgian conflict.
Opposition supporters and other critics of Pozner’s presence rallied outside his hotel in Tbilisi following his arrival on March 31.
In some cases, demonstrators holding placards calling Pozner a “Kremlin propagandist” and “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s ideologist” clashed with police.
They cut off electricity to a venue hosting a dinner event at least twice, and some reportedly tried to force their way into the hotel.
Pozner and his entourage left a second hotel early on April 1 surrounded by police, who accompanied them to Tbilisi’s international airport.
Pozner complained that he “came to [Georgia] not to talk about politics but to mark” his birthday.
The Interior Ministry said on April 1 that Pozner and 31 of his 41 associates were fined 2,000 laris ($585) each for violating sanitary regulations introduced over the coronavirus pandemic while moving between the two hotels.
His initial hotel, Vinotel, was reportedly fined 10,000 laris ($2,925) for hosting a birthday party for Pozner and his companions, since public gatherings at restaurants are banned by coronavirus restrictions.
Garibashvili called the protests “actions that violated civilized norms and Georgian standards.”
Major protests by thousands of people were sparked in Tbilisi in June 2019 after Russian lawmaker Sergei Gavrilov spoke in Russian from the speaker’s chair of the Georgian parliament during an international meeting of Orthodox-minded lawmakers.
The resulting protest outside parliament descended into violence when riot police fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannons.
More than 240 people were injured in that crackdown, including more than 30 journalists and 80 policemen.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled in favor of an RFE/RL Ukrainian Service journalist who has battled against the handover of her smartphone data to authorities in what the court agreed is an essential defense of a free press and privacy in democratic society.
Natalia Sedletska, who hosts the award-winning investigative TV program Schemes, has been locked in a three-year battle to protect her phone data from seizure by Ukrainian prosecutors investigating a leak of state secrets nearly four years ago.
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The ECHR concluded that Sedletska should be protected from the data search under Article 10 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and stressed the importance of protection of sources for a functioning free press.
“[T]he court is not convinced that the data access authorization given by the domestic courts was justified by an ‘overriding requirement in the public interest’ and, therefore, necessary in a democratic society,” the decision read.
Sedletska turned to the European rights court after a Ukrainian court ruling in 2018 gave authorities unlimited access to 17 months of her smartphone data.
Schemes had reported on several investigations involving senior Ukrainian officials, including Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko, during the period in question.
Sedletska has argued that the Ukrainian ruling contravened domestic law and Kyiv’s commitments to a free press.
Her application to the ECHR sought protection from the seizure of her communications data as such judicial action was not “necessary in a democratic society,” and was grossly disproportionate and not justified by any “overriding requirement in the public interest.”
The ECHR agreed and stressed that “the protection of journalistic sources is one of the cornerstones of freedom of the press.”
The prosecutors pressed for access to Sedletska’s phone data in connection with a criminal investigation into the alleged disclosure of state secrets to journalists in 2017 by Artem Sytnyk, director of the country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
On August 2018, Kyiv’s Pechersk district court approved a request by the Ukrainian Prosecutor-General’s Office to allow investigators to review all of Sedletska’s mobile-phone data from a 17-month period.
The European Parliament in 2018 passed a resolution expressing “concern” at the Ukrainian ruling and stressing the importance of media freedom and the protection of journalists’ sources.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the watchdog groups Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Reporters Without Borders have also backed Sedletska’s arguments.
Schemes is a corruption-focused TV program produced by RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service and Ukrainian Public Television. It had a combined audience across its two channels of more than 10 million last year.
Six months ahead of a planned presidential election and with physical attacks on government critics mounting, Uzbekistan has criminalized “insult and slander” of the president in digital and online form.
The Uzbek Justice Ministry announced the immediate implementation of the defamation clauses via Telegram on March 31 and said offenders could face up to five years in prison.
It cited amendments to that post-Soviet Central Asian republic’s Criminal Code and legislation signed the previous day by President Shavkat Mirziyoev, who took over in a disputed handover after the death of his long-serving predecessor in 2016.
The changes also threaten up to five years in prison for public calls for mass disorder and violence and up to 10 years in prison for doing so in groups using media, telecommunication networks, or the Internet.
Mirziyoev’s first term expires later this year, but he is expected to run for a second term.
He took over as head of the Central Asia’s most populous state, with 32 citizens, after authoritarian leader Islam Karimov’s death was announced in September 2016.
Mirziyoev has since positioned himself as a reformer, releasing political prisoners and opening his country to its neighbors and the outside world, although many activists say the changes have not gone nearly far enough.
Although Mirziyoev has said he is not against having opposition political groups in Uzbekistan, it has been nearly impossible for genuine opposition parties to get registered since the country gained independence in late 1991.
As if to underscore the problem as the new clampdown on defamation came into effect, unknown assailants attacked activists for a freshly created opposition group called Truth And Development on April 1 while supporters were gathering signatures in support of registration by the Justice Ministry.
The attackers beat activists and destroyed tables and chairs set up outside the new party’s offices.
Meanwhile, international watchdog group Human Rights Watch (HRW) on March 31 urged Uzbek authorities to find and punish those responsible for a “vicious attack” this week on a blogger and popular critic of the government, Miraziz Bazarov.
Bazarov had recently spoken out for LGBT rights before he was attacked by a group of men outside his home in Tashkent on March 28.
“The police should thoroughly and impartially investigate this violent assault on Miraziz Bazarov, examining all possible motivations,” HRW Europe and Central Asia Director Hugh Williamson said, adding, “At a time when homophobia is on the rise in Uzbekistan, it’s critical for the authorities to bring those responsible to justice.”
The next presidential election in Uzbekistan will be held on October 24.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is calling on Kazakhstan to drop the criminal case against a blogger and journalist who went on trial earlier this month on charges of participating in the activities of a banned organization.
In a statement on March 31, the New York-based media freedom watchdog urged the Kazakh authorities to immediately release Aigul Otepova from house arrest, drop the charges against her, and “allow her to work safely and freely.”
Journalists in Kazakhstan “should not be persecuted for their independent reporting, and it is authorities’ responsibility to ensure journalists’ safety, not to intimidate and pressure them,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna.
Otepova’s trial started in the capital, Nur-Sultan, on March 15, with the journalist attending the hearings remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Authorities accused her of supporting the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) opposition movement, which has been labeled as an extremist group and banned in the country.
Otepova denies participating in any political movements and says the case against her is retaliation for her political coverage.
If convicted, the journalist could face up to two years of imprisonment.
Amnesty International has said that Otepova was “a prisoner of conscience who is being prosecuted solely for the peaceful expression of her views.”
Otepova was detained in mid-September and put under house arrest after she placed a post on Facebook criticizing official efforts to curb the coronavirus outbreak.
In November, she was placed in a psychiatric clinic for 18 days for a mandatory mental health evaluation. The journalist was released on December 11 and remained under house arrest.
Human rights groups have criticized the Kazakh government for years for persecuting independent and opposition journalists.
Rights activists in Kazakhstan have criticized authorities for using Soviet-era method of stifling dissent by placing opponents in psychiatric clinics.
Then and now photographs of the April 1941 “terror bombing” that forever changed the face of the Serbian capital.
Click or tap on the images to reveal the same place in 2021.
The Old Palace in central Belgrade, which once featured cupolas and an elaborate entrance gate. After the 1941 bombing, the palace was rebuilt without the decorative flourishes.
Belgrade’s Old Palace was one of several buildings shattered by Nazi bombs on April 6, 1941. The air raid destroyed much of the center of the capital, killed thousands of people, and wiped out much of the published cultural heritage of Serbia when the National Library burned to the ground.
Republic Square lies largely in ruins after the bombing.
The attack that targeted central Belgrade, which had no apparent military objective, was ordered by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler after a coup overthrew Yugoslavia’s royal regent, Prince Peter, in late March 1941.
Obliterated buildings near the Belgrade Fortress
Before the coup, Yugoslavia had come under intense pressure to align itself with fascist Germany, as Yugoslavia’s neighbors Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania had done.
An apartment block in a Belgrade suburb lies in ruins. Only the building on the far right remains the same.
Shortly after Yugoslavia signed a pact with Nazi Germany and her allies — seen as the “lesser of two evils” compared to the inevitable invasion if Yugoslavia had refused — senior Yugoslav Air Force officials overthrew Prince Peter.
The iconic Hotel Moscow (right) barely escaped destruction during the bombing.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill responded to news of the coup by saying: “Early this morning, the Yugoslav nation found its soul.
A revolution has taken place in Belgrade, and the ministers who but yesterday signed away the honor and freedom of the country are reported to be under arrest.
This patriotic movement arises from the wrath of a valiant and warlike race at the betrayal of their country by the weakness of their rulers and the foul intrigues of the Axis powers.”
People walk along a street near the Danube River on which several buildings were wiped out.
Some believe British intelligence was involved in the coup, but England had no concrete way to help Yugoslavia.
The coup was reportedly popular with many Belgrade locals who chanted “better graves than to be slaves.”
Hitler condemned thousands of Belgraders to exactly that fate when he ordered a Nazi response to the coup of “merciless severity.”
A destroyed building stands in downtown Belgrade after the bombing.
The building housing Yugoslavia’s Defense Ministry replaced the ruined structure in 1965 and was itself blasted by NATO bombs in 1999. It is itself now mostly unused.
Italian war correspondent and novelist Curzio Malaparte said the waves of bombings on April 6 caused the ground to shake “as if it were an earthquake.” The correspondent recalled that “houses hit each other, there was a terrible crash of collapsing walls and [broken windows] falling on the sidewalks.”
A destroyed tram sits on a road alongside the Belgrade Fortress.
In the pauses between the German bombing runs, Malaparte described “devastating, terrified screams, lamentations, moans, curses, and the roar of a distraught people…”
The main entrance to Belgrade’s train station, which was gutted by explosions and fire caused by incendiary bombs.
After Belgrade’s zoo was hit, Churchill wrote that “out of the nightmare of smoke and fire came the maddened animals released from their shattered cages…”
Damaged buildings opposite Belgrade’s main train station
The photo above and several others in this gallery were made by an Italian soldier who was part of the fascist invasion of Yugoslavia and arrived in Belgrade shortly after the bombing.
The gap left by a large building that was wiped out during the bombing was filled with a new structure.
After Belgrade was occupied on April 12, some 375,000 Yugoslav soldiers became Nazi prisoners of war.
Jewish men were rounded up by the Nazis and forced to clear the rubble left in their city.
A man accused of being an anti-Nazi “partisan” hangs from a lamppost in central Belgrade.
The Ukrainian Army chief has accused Moscow of conducting a military buildup near their shared border and has reiterated claims that pro-Moscow separatists continue to violate a cease-fire in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
The buildup is taking place “under the guise of preparing for strategic exercises” and is in addition to thousands of troops in combat brigades, regiments, and supply units deployed in the occupied Donbas with the support of Russian regular troops, Khomchak said.
“The Armed Forces of Ukraine respond accordingly to such actions of our eastern neighbor,” Khomchak said. “We are preparing for all possible provocations and reactions to the actions of the enemy.”
Ruslan Khomchak is chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. (file photo)
Khomchak first made the accusations of a military buildup in a speech to the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) on March 30.
The comments drew a response from Russian President Vladimir Putin during a videoconference call with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Kremlin said on March 31.
Putin placed the blame for tensions on Ukraine and urged Kyiv to enter into direct dialogue with local separatist forces.
“The Russian side expressed serious concern over the escalation of armed confrontation that is being provoked by Ukraine along the line of contact and its effective refusal to implement the agreements of July 2020…to strengthen the cease-fire regime,” the Kremlin said in a statement late on March 30.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in comments to reporters on March 31, said Putin has not drawn any “red lines” regarding the situation in southeastern Ukraine.
“In general, the issues on the agenda were the absence of any alternatives to compliance with the Minsk accords and the problem situation that has taken shape in connection with the non-compliance with these agreements,” Peskov said, according to TASS, referring to a 2015 agreement brokered by France and Germany.
A statement from the Elysee indicated that during the video conference call Macron and Merkel urged Putin to take steps to de-escalate.
“The need for Russia to make a determined commitment to stabilize the cease-fire in Ukraine and work out a way out of the crisis while respecting the Minsk Agreements was underlined. “
Germany, Russia, and France are part of the so-called Normandy Format that also includes Ukraine and was set up to try to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Fighting between government forces and Russia-backed separatists has killed more than 13,000 people since April 2014.
The Ukrainian military said last week that four of its soldiers were killed in shelling in the country’s east in the latest violence. It said the shelling on March 26 targeted Ukrainian forces and was the latest violation of a cease-fire agreed in July 2020.
UN experts have voiced concern over reports of “grave human rights abuses” by Russian mercenaries in the Central African Republic (CAR), where they have been backing the government’s military in the country’s ongoing civil war.
“The experts have received, and continue to receive, reports of grave human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law, attributable to the private military personnel operating jointly with CAR’s armed forces and in some instances UN peacekeepers,” the experts said in a statement on March 31.
The alleged abuses include mass summary executions, arbitrary detentions, torture, forced disappearances, forced displacement of civilians, indiscriminate targeting of civilian facilities, and attacks on humanitarian workers.
The experts said they were “deeply disturbed by the interconnected roles of [Russian private contractors from] Sewa Security Services, Russian-owned Lobaye Invest SARLU, and a Russian-based organization popularly known as the [Vagner] Group.”
They spoke of concerns over the mercenaries’ connection “to a series of violent attacks that have occurred since the presidential elections” on December 27.
CAR has been in turmoil since a 2013 rebellion ousted former President Francois Bozize. About a quarter of its 5 million people are displaced.
President Faustin-Archange Touadera was sworn in for a second five-year term on March 30 after winning December’s election.
Government security forces have been backed by a 12,000-strong UN peacekeeping contingent as well as hundreds of Russian and Rwandan paramilitaries and soldiers deployed in late December.
They also said they were “disturbed to learn of the proximity and interoperability between those contractors” and the UN force.
Russia has denied Vagner mercenaries are in the African country, saying only military instructors have been sent to train government soldiers since 2018.
Jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny on March 31 has declared a hunger strike until he receives proper medical treatment for severe back pain and numbness in his legs.
“I have declared a hunger strike demanding that the law be upheld and a doctor of my choice be allowed to visit me,” Navalny said in an Instagram post, which was published through his lawyers.
Navalny, 44, is currently incarcerated in Correctional Colony No. 2, about 100 kilometers from Moscow, The prison is known as one of the toughest penitentiaries in Russia.
He was detained at a Moscow airport in January immediately upon returning from Berlin, where he had recovered from what several Western laboratories determined was a poisoning attempt using a Novichok-type nerve agent that saw him fall seriously ill on a flight in Siberia in August 2020.
Navalny has said the assassination attempt was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin — an allegation rejected by the Kremlin.
A Moscow court in February ruled that, while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an older embezzlement case, which is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His suspended 3 1/2-year sentence was converted into jail time, though the court reduced that amount to 2 1/2 years for time already served in detention.
Navalny’s health became an issue last week after his allies said they were worried that he was ailing and called on prison authorities to clarify his condition.
Navalny said he was suffering from severe back pains and that “nothing” was being done by prison authorities to solve the problem other than being given some ibuprofen.
Hundreds of Russian physicians have demanded authorities to provide immediate medical assistance to jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny amid growing concerns over the state of his health.
Navalny’s incarceration set off a wave of national protests and a crackdown against his supporters.
The European Union, the United States, and Canada have imposed a series of sanctions against Russia over the Navalny case.
Jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny on March 31 has declared a hunger strike until he receives proper medical treatment for severe back pain and numbness in his legs.
“I have declared a hunger strike demanding that the law be upheld and a doctor of my choice be allowed to visit me,” Navalny said in an Instagram post, which was published through his lawyers.
Navalny, 44, is currently incarcerated in Correctional Colony No. 2, about 100 kilometers from Moscow, The prison is known as one of the toughest penitentiaries in Russia.
He was detained at a Moscow airport in January immediately upon returning from Berlin, where he had recovered from what several Western laboratories determined was a poisoning attempt using a Novichok-type nerve agent that saw him fall seriously ill on a flight in Siberia in August 2020.
Navalny has said the assassination attempt was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin — an allegation rejected by the Kremlin.
A Moscow court in February ruled that, while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an older embezzlement case, which is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His suspended 3 1/2-year sentence was converted into jail time, though the court reduced that amount to 2 1/2 years for time already served in detention.
Navalny’s health became an issue last week after his allies said they were worried that he was ailing and called on prison authorities to clarify his condition.
Navalny said he was suffering from severe back pains and that “nothing” was being done by prison authorities to solve the problem other than being given some ibuprofen.
Hundreds of Russian physicians have demanded authorities to provide immediate medical assistance to jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny amid growing concerns over the state of his health.
Navalny’s incarceration set off a wave of national protests and a crackdown against his supporters.
The European Union, the United States, and Canada have imposed a series of sanctions against Russia over the Navalny case.
KYIV — Kyiv authorities say they will close schools and kindergartens and restrict public transport from April 5, as the Ukrainian capital faces a dramatic rise in coronavirus infections and related deaths.
“We have no other option. Otherwise, there will be hundreds of deaths every day,” Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on March 31.
Starting next week, all schools and kindergartens will remain closed while Kyiv public transport will operate on special passenger passes for those working for critical infrastructure enterprises.
The Ukrainian capital has the highest infection rate in the country of 41 million people.
According to Klitschko, Kyiv COVID-19-dedicated hospitals were 80 percent full.
Earlier on March 31, the authorities reported a record daily high of 407 coronavirus-related deaths over the previous 24 hours.
A total of 11,226 new infections were recorded, raising the total to more than 1,674,000 since the pandemic began more than a year ago. Nearly 33,000 people have died from COVID-19 in Ukraine.
Germany’s coordinator for transatlantic relations has called for a moratorium on construction on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a project that is fiercely opposed by the United States.
“The project is a serious obstacle for a new start in transatlantic relations,” Peter Beyer, a member of Merkel’s conservatives, told German business weekly WirtschaftsWoche, in an apparent departure from Germany’s official support for the project.
“The Americans expect us not only to change our rhetoric, but also to let actions speak. I therefore plead for a construction moratorium on Nord Stream 2,” Beyer said.
Germany so far has been pushing for the pipeline’s completion despite sustained U.S. opposition over more than a decade.
The undersea pipeline between Russia and Germany, which is about 95-percent completed and could be finished by September, has come under fierce criticism from Washington.
U.S. officials warn it will make Europe more dependent on Russian energy supplies, and U.S. President Joe Biden is dangling the threat of sanctions.
Washington has already imposed sanctions on the Russian company KVT-RUS, which operates the pipe-laying vessel Fortuna. That measure was announced by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump shortly before the end of his term in January.
Berlin had seemingly hoped Biden’s administration might take a softer stance, but U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has told Germany the project is “a bad idea, bad for Europe, bad for the United States” and warned that sanctions against Nord Stream 2 were a real possibility.
Russia and Germany argue that Nord Stream 2, an $11 billion venture led by Russian state energy company Gazprom, is mainly a commercial project.
Supporters of the pipeline under the Baltic Sea say the U.S. opposition to Nord Stream is grounded in its interest in selling more of its own liquefied gas to Europe.
Kosovo’s foreign minister has rejected pressure from Turkey over Pristina’s recent opening of an embassy in the western part of Jerusalem by calling the move “a done deal.”
Foreign Minister Donika Gervalla made the remark in an interview with the corruption-reporting website Kallxo.com on March 30.
Mostly Muslim Kosovar, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, established diplomatic ties with Israel in a virtual ceremony on February 1 before establishing the embassy in Jerusalem in March.
The United States and Guatemala are the only other states with embassies in Jerusalem.
“I believe that the issue of our embassy in Israel is a done deal,” Gervalla said. “Why is it a done deal? Because we cannot get involved in diplomatic adventures to reconsider an issue that already has ended.”
Gervalla said Pristina wants to bolster ties with Israel but also seeks “a good friendship, good ties with Palestinian authorities.”
Palestinian leaders claim east Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed, as the capital of a future state.
Most countries have embassies in Tel Aviv.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sent a letter last week to incoming Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti urging his government to reconsider the Israeli move.
Hoti’s caretaker predecessor, Avdullah Hoti, attended a summit hosted by then-U.S. President Donald Trump and also attended by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in September.
Much of the international focus was on efforts to restart talks to normalize relations between Pristina and Belgrade, which along with Russia and some EU members does not recognize Kosovar independence.
But Hoti emerged with a side deal to an economic agreement pledging fresh ties with Israel. Serbia, which already had ties to Israel, also agreed to open an embassy in Jerusalem.
Trump spent a good part of his final year in office encouraging an Israeli push for broader normalization with its Arab and Muslim countries.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is battling to stay in power after inconclusive elections, praised the embassy move in a letter to Kurti and invited the Kosovar leader to Jerusalem for an embassy-opening ceremony.
The Moscow branch of the ruling United Russia party has raised eyebrows with a social media video that features the 7-year-old son of former Deputy Prime Minister and opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead outside the Kremlin in February 2015.
The video, issued to mark International Theater Day on March 27, shows the boy – also named Boris Nemtsov — reciting outside downtown Moscow’s Pushkin Drama Theater in brilliant spring sunshine.
It was deleted briefly and later reposted, this time without wording that had referred to the boy by name and explained that he recited a poem written by the 19th-century poet Aleksandr Pushkin toward the end of his life as part of an Easter triptych.
In aninterview with MBX Media, the child’s mother, Yekaterina Iftodi, said that her son “has participated in and will participate in” United Russia activities.
“The leadership of this country has shown great understanding and profound respect for this child,” she said.
“This is just a child,” she added. “I think it is dumb to attribute any principles to this because of his father. He doesn’t have any political views.”
Iftodi herself joined United Russia, the structure that holds a near monopoly on political power at all levels in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, earlier this year. With polls indicating its popular support is close to record lows, United Russia faces a test in elections to the State Duma, Russia’s lower parliament chamber, that are expected in September.
“Thanks to the leadership of this country, we got some sort of justice, and we will never forget that,” she told MBX Media.
Nemtsov was an outspoken critic of Putin and United Russia. In 2017, a Moscow military court convicted five ethnic Chechens of murdering Nemtsov on a bridge outside the Kremlin on February 27, 2015 and sentenced them to prison terms from 11 to 20 years. The organizers of the killing have never been identified, but Nemtsov’s family believes it was organized by people with ties to Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov and Putin.
Iftodi, who met Nemtsov in 2013, sued to have her son acknowledged as his child shortly after he was killed. His other children refused to cooperate, but a DNA test was performed using material from the crime scene.
In September 2017, a Moscow district court, in closed session, ruled that the child was Nemtsov’s and ordered that he be issued a passport with the name Boris Borisovich Nemtsov.
Nemtsov, who was 55 when he was killed, had one child, daughter Zhanna, born in 1984, with his wife, Raisa Nemtsova. The couple separated in the 1990s, but never divorced.
The charismatic politician also had two children with journalist Yekaterina Odintsova. Their son Anton was born in 1995 and their daughter Dina, in 2002.
In 2004, Nemtsov had a daughter, Sofya, with his secretary, Irina Korolyova.
The poem the child recited ends with a prayer asking God to protect the narrator from “the love of power.”
“Give to me, o Lord, to see my own faults, and may my brother not be judged by me,” it states.
The Council of Europe says states across the continent last year continued to make “progress” on implementing judgments from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) despite the coronavirus pandemic.
But it stressed that further efforts are needed to tackle issues such as ill-treatment or deaths caused by security forces and poor conditions of detention, as well as a “growing number of cases concerning abusive limitations on rights and freedoms.”
The assessment was part of the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers’ annual report for 2020 on the execution of ECHR judgments.
States with the highest total number of new cases last year were Russia (218), Turkey (103), and Ukraine (84), followed by Romania (78) and Hungary (61).
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These countries also had the highest number of pending cases at the end of 2020: Russia (1,789), Turkey (624), Ukraine (567), Romania (347), and Hungary (276).
The states over which the ECHR awarded the most “just satisfaction” to applicants were Romania ($43.9 million), Russia ($13.4 million), Italy ($6 million), Montenegro ($5.4 million), and Moldova ($4.9 million).
Council of Europe Secretary-General Marija Pejcinovic Buric said in a statement that the report shows that member states take their obligations to implement judgments from the Strasbourg-based court “very seriously, even in difficult circumstances.”
However, Buric noted that “many important judgments have been outstanding for several years and a small number of high-profile cases are not being resolved quickly enough.”
“Our member states have a duty to implement ECHR judgments promptly and fully. This is not a kind request — it is a binding requirement,” she insisted.
According to the report, 983 cases were closed by the Committee of Ministers in 2020, which marked the 70th anniversary of the European Convention on Human Rights, as a result of steps taken by the relevant member states.
At the end of the year, 5,233 cases had yet to be fully implemented by the member states involved — among the lowest counts since 2006.
The report states that 581 payments of “just satisfaction” to applicants, awarded by the ECHR, were made on time in 2020, while the Committee of Ministers was still awaiting confirmation of payment in 1,574 cases at the end of December.
Among the most significant cases that the committee was able to close in 2020 were three cases regarding abusive limitations of the rights to liberty and security in Azerbaijan, and a case concerning voting rights in local elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
But the report cautions there is “not a time for complacency” because “serious challenges continue to be raised in the context of the execution of many cases.”
It cited an interstate case opposing Georgia and Russia, a “larger number” of individual applications linked to post-conflict situations or unresolved conflicts, and “many long-standing systemic and structural problems” concerning in particular “ineffective investigations” into ill-treatment or death caused by security forces and poor conditions of detention.
BISHKEK — Natalia Gherman, the UN secretary-general’s special representative for Central Asia, has proposed to Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov the establishment of a UN-Kyrgyzstan Human Rights Dialogue.
Gherman, who also heads the UN Regional Center for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia, held talks with Japarov in Bishkek on March 30, according to the Kyrgyz presidential press service.
The sides also discussed reforms initiated by Japarov after he took power following predecessor Sooronbai Jeenbekov’s forced resignation in mid-October amid anti-government rallies protesting the official results of parliamentary elections.
Japarov, who assumed power through a chaotic handover whose legitimacy was disputed by critics, won a rapidly organized presidential election on January 10 that coincided with a referendum on a return to a presidential system.
The proposed constitutional changes aim to significantly widen presidential powers and extend the number of allowable presidential terms from one to two.
The amendments also envisage the creation of a so-called People’s Kurultai (Assembly), described as “a consultative and coordinating organ” controlled by the president.
A Constitutional Court would also be created and the number of lawmakers in the legislature reduced from 120 to 90.
Many in Kyrgyzstan have criticized Japarov, saying that he is looking to impose a more authoritarian system of rule by changing the constitution. Japarov has rejected such accusations.
The constitutional amendments are facing a nationwide referendum scheduled for April 11.
Gherman emphasized that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres continues to closely monitor developments in Kyrgyzstan since the October political crisis.
She praised Kyrgyzstan’s recent move to allow the transfer of 79 children born to Kyrgyz citizens who joined the Islamic State extremist group in Iraq.
Gherman also expressed UN readiness to assist Bishkek’s anti-pandemic efforts.
Japarov assured Gherman that rights and freedoms in Kyrgyzstan, including freedom of speech, as well as all of his country’s international commitments are respected, and expressed interest to cooperate with UN entities.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, says in a forthcoming book that his service on the board of a Ukrainian gas firm at the center of the scandal that prompted ex-President Donald Trump’s first impeachment wasn’t unethical and didn’t represent a lack of judgment on his part.
But the 51-year-old presidential son writes in his memoirs, titled Beautiful Things, set to be released next week, that if given a chance, he wouldn’t take the job again.
Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings hired Hunter Biden to serve on its board in 2014, while his father was vice president and helping steer and implement President Barack Obama’s foreign policy in Eastern Europe.
During his unsuccessful reelection campaign against Biden, Trump’s Republican allies last year repeatedly raised the issue of Hunter Biden’s work for the Ukrainian company.
E-mails and other potentially damaging materials related to him and Burisma circulated in some U.S. news media weeks before the vote, with former U.S. intelligence officials warning that the materials were part of a Russian hacking and disinformation campaign.
Trump confidants, Republican operatives, and some Ukrainians pushed the suggestion that then-Vice President Joe Biden sought the firing of Ukraine’s then-top prosecutor in order to protect his son.
U.S. lawmakers later found no evidence that Biden’s work as vice president was influenced by his son’s employment at Burisma.
In December 2019, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress over a phone conversation Trump had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in July of that year.
A whistle-blower complaint highlighted part of a conversation in which the U.S. president asked his Ukrainian counterpart to “look into” allegations of wrongdoing by Biden and his son and the Ukrainian firm.
Trump is also heard seemingly conditioning further U.S. military assistance on Ukraine investigating the Bidens.
Trump was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate in the impeachment trial.
“The episode that led to the impeachment of a president and put me at the heart of the greatest political fable of the decade is most notable for its epic banality,” Hunter Biden writes in his book.
Acknowledging that he might have been appointed to the board because of his last name, Hunter Biden writes that his “response has always been to work harder so that my accomplishments are self-sustaining.”
Hunter Biden says his only misjudgment was not considering, when he joined Burisma’s board to help oversee its corporate practices, that Trump would become president in 2017.
“I have not done anything unethical and have never been charged with wrongdoing,” he also says, adding: “What I do believe, in this current climate, is that it wouldn’t matter what I did or didn’t do. The attacks weren’t intended for me. They were meant to wound my dad.”
“Knowing all of that now: No, I would not do it again,” Biden writes. “I wouldn’t take the seat on Burisma’s board. Trump would have to look elsewhere to find a suitable distraction for his impeachable behavior.”
Hunter Biden’s memoir centers on his battle with alcohol and drug addiction following the death of his older brother, Beau, of brain cancer in 2015.
The president’s son ends the book by saying he is now sober, living with his second wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, and their baby son, Beau.
He also has three daughters from his previous marriage.
![Pretrial detention puts “what remains of [my father's] health” in jeopardy, says Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.](https://gdb.rferl.org/be75ab12-ed6c-49ee-928e-49469b563159_w250_r0_s.jpg)
