A group of lawmakers in the U.S. Congress has condemned the “unjust and illegitimate detainment” of Ihar Losik, a popular blogger and RFE/RL consultant jailed in Belarus, calling for his immediate release in the latest show of support from the highest echelons of government.
In a letter addressed to Losik on March 26, a bipartisan group of lawmakers said they stand “shoulder to shoulder” with him, his family, and all other Belarusians struggling in the country’s pro-democracy movement amid a violent government crackdown following a presidential election last August that authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka claimed to win and which the opposition says was rigged.
“We join the international community in strongly condemning your unjust and illegitimate detainment by the Belarusian authorities,” the seven lawmakers said in the letter. “We stand ready to hold those complicit in your illegitimate detention to account through targeted sanctions working with our friends and allies in the European Union.”
The letter was signed by Representatives Marcy Kaptur (Democrat-Ohio), Bill Keating (Democrat-Massachusetts), David Cicilline (Democrat-Rhode Island), Tom Malinowski (Democrat-New Jersey), James McGovern (Democrat-Massachusetts), Brian Fitzpatrick (Republican-Pennsylvania), and Chris Smith (Republican-New Jersey).
Lukashenka, who has ruled the country since 1994, has directed a brutal postelection crackdown in which almost 30,000 people have been detained, hundreds beaten, several killed, and the media targeted.
Losik is among nearly 300 political prisoners caught up in the crackdown.
In response to the suppression of protesters, the West has slapped sanctions on top officials and refuses to recognize Lukashenka as the legitimate leader of the former Soviet republic.
The 28-year-old Losik has been in pretrial detention since June 2020 on charges widely considered trumped up.
He was initially charged with allegedly using his popular Telegram channel to “prepare to disrupt public order” ahead of a presidential election last August.
Earlier this month, he tried to slit his wrists and launched a four-day hunger strike after being informed of new, unspecified charges. He had previously launched a six-week hunger strike to protest the original charges.
On March 22, 11 days after he was informed of the new charges, a court extended Losik’s pretrial detention to May 25.
RFE/RL President Jamie Fly condemned the move and the new charges, saying the father of a 2-year-old daughter should be released immediately so he can be reunited with his family.
“Journalism is not a crime and Ihar has been unjustly detained for far too long. Ihar and his family should not be tortured in this way,” Fly wrote, adding that RFE/RL was “deeply distressed” by the new charges and Losik’s deteriorating health situation.
The oversight agency for RFE/RL and other U.S. international broadcasters has also condemned the Belarusian authorities’ decision to heap further charges on Losik and has demanded his release.
The U.S. State Department and other members of Congress have previously condemned the wrongful detention of Losik and other political prisoners.
U.S. President Joe Biden has invited the leaders of China and Russia to a climate summit he is hosting in April, despite deep differences with the two countries on a host of other issues.
Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia are among 40 world leaders invited to the two-day virtual summit, meant to highlight the United States’ renewed commitment to stemming climate change, the White House said.
The start of the summit on April 22 coincides with Earth Day and will “underscore the urgency — and the economic benefits — of stronger climate action,” the White House said.
The gathering is expected to build towards the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) this November in Glasgow, Scotland.
Biden rejoined the Paris climate agreement on his first day in the White House, reversing former President Donald Trump’s exit from the landmark accord.
The White House has said that climate change is one area where it may be possible to cooperate with China and Russia, even as ties are strained over many other issues.
The United States is the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide after China.
KALININGRAD, Russia — A Russian woman serving a prison sentence on high treason charges has started a hunger strike to protest against being put in solitary confinement for complaining about beatings, her lawyer says.
Antonina Zimina’s lawyer told RFE/RL on March 26 that her client has been on hunger strike for four days in a detention center in Kaliningrad, the capital of Russia’s far western exclave of the same name.
In late December 2020, Zimina and her husband, Konstantin Antonets, were found guilty of spying for Latvia.
Antonets was handed a 12 1/2 year prison sentence. The couple has denied any wrongdoing ever since they were first arrested in July 2018.
Zimina’s lawyer, Maria Bontsler, said she was sent to seven days of solitary confinement on March 22 for “covering the observation hole on the door of her cell from inside and refusing to sign a registry of cleaning shifts,” a routine procedure for inmates who are required to clean the premises.
Zimina covered the observation hole while she was changing her clothes and refused to sign the registry because a guard who beat her in the past brought it for signing, according to Bontsler.
The lawyer added that the real reason behind Zimina’s placement in solitary confinement is most likely the complaints she voiced to officials of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) last week about her beatings by guards.
“The next day, she was called to the detention center’s operative department and instructed to sign documents retracting her statements. Now they are threatening to sue her for libel,” Bontsler said.
Zimina’s father, Konstantin Zimin, told RFE/RL that he was not allowed to see his daughter when he came to the detention center on March 26.
The Ukrainian military says four of its soldiers have been killed in shelling in the country’s east, where fighting between government forces and Russia-backed separatists has killed more than 13,000 people since April 2014.
“Today, March 26, the armed forces of the Russian Federation once again violated the cease-fire” agreed in July 2020 and targeted the positions of Ukrainian forces with “82-mm mortars, automatic grenade launchers, and large-caliber machine guns prohibited by the Minsk agreements” aimed at putting an end to the conflict, the military said in a statement.
It said two soldiers were also injured in the attack, which occurred near the settlement of Shumy, north of the separatist stronghold of Donetsk.
The skirmish brings the total number of Ukrainian servicemen reported killed since fresh fighting broke out again in mid-February to 16, according to AFP.
In a joint statement on March 18, the G7 group of nations noted that the cease-fire implemented last year has “significantly reduced violence” in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk while also deploring “recent military escalations by Russian-backed armed formations at the line of contact.”
The foreign ministers of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States, as well as the EU foreign policy chief, called on Moscow to implement its commitments to the Minsk agreements, and “stop fueling the conflict” by providing “financial and military support to the separatists.
Moscow claims it only provides political and humanitarian support to the separatists holding parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, and says Russians fighting there are volunteers.
YEREVAN — Armenia’s Constitutional Court has ruled that a criminal case against former President Robert Kocharian must be dropped, ending a legal saga over a deadly crackdown on protesters more than a decade ago.
The high court on March 26 found “invalid” an article of the Criminal Code under which Armenia’s second president was being prosecuted.
Court Chairman Arman Dilanian said Article 300.1 of the Criminal Code regarding “overthrowing the constitutional order” runs counter to two articles of the constitution. The decision is final.
The ruling means Kocharian’s case must be terminated, according to the ex-president’s lawyer Aram Vardevanian.
Prosecutors did not immediately comment.
Kocharian, who served as the South Caucasus country’s president from 1998 to 2008, was accused of violating the constitutional order by sending police to disperse postelection protests in Yerevan in 2008. Eight demonstrators and two police officers died in the clashes.
The ex-president, who is also accused of taking bribes in a separate case, has rejected the allegations against him as political retaliation by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian. Kocharian was released from detention in June 2020 after paying a record $4.1 million bail.
Pashinian was one of the organizers of the 2008 protest and was ultimately jailed until being released in 2011 under a government amnesty.
Pashinian came to power in 2018 after leading massive demonstrations that ousted his predecessor.
The high court verdict comes as Armenia prepares for early parliamentary elections in June, triggered by opposition demands Pashinian step down over his leadership during a six-week war with Azerbaijan over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region, which ended in what many Armenians felt was a humiliating defeat.
Kocharian, a native of Nagorno-Karabakh, was one of the leaders of the region’s separatist forces and was Nagorno-Karabakh’s first de facto president between December 1994 and March 1997.
In January, Kocharian said he would participate in any early elections.
SHYMKENT, Kazakhstan — Turn out the lights, the party’s over.
But for officials in the southern Kazakh city of Shymkent, the trouble may have just begun.
Some residents are demanding an investigation after the local government said it spent around $1.3 million on Norouz celebrations this month.
The statement on the public procurement agency’s website sparked angry public criticism from people who want to know where the money went. They say the mostly online events were far more modest than previous years and didn’t look like a million-dollar party.
The average monthly salary in Kazakhstan is a little over $500, according to CEIC Data, an economics website.
After the burst of public criticism, Shymkent city authorities belatedly said that the amounts represented all the funds set aside by the city for all of the year’s celebrations. But an itemized list of the spending suggested otherwise, and the damage to public trust appears to have been done.
Shymkent’s celebrations to mark the Persian New Year included music and poetry competitions, an event to mark the anniversary of a local magazine, and advertisements of local cultural sites, among other things.
Norouz events throughout the Central Asian state of around 19 million people on March 21-23 were heavily scaled down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Norouz celebrations were not as big as previous years. It invites the question: Where have all those funds gone?” one Shymkent resident asked.
She added that throwing parties during the pandemic wasn’t necessary in the first place, and the “money should have been spent for more important purposes.”
One Shymkent man told RFE/RL that he hadn’t noticed a single major Norouz event in Shymkent this year.
Another resident agreed. “They installed several traditional yurts in the old town. Did that cost that much money?” he said. “It boggles the mind to waste [that much] public money. It’s very irresponsible, it’s recklessness with public funds.”
Changing Sums
According to the public procurement agency’s website, the Norouz expenditure included the equivalent of $188,000 for a music contest, $117,600 for an anniversary event of a popular magazine called Haikap, and about $54,000 for the promotion of cultural spots.
Another $94,000 was said to have been spent to organize the “aitys,” a traditional song-and-poetry competition held between poets, known locally as “aqyns.”
Local journalist Miyat Kashibai said he compared the Norouz events in Shymkent and the city of Taraz and found that Shymkent’s authorities claimed to have spent a lot more money for a similar scale of events. “According to my calculations, Taraz spent about $35,000 for its aitys, which took place shortly before the event in Shymkent. The aitys competitions in both cities were exactly on the same level,” Kashibai said.
City officials later said there had been a mistake and that the reported $1.3 million was the amount set aside for all of this year’s celebrations.
Deputy Governor Shyngys Mukan did not respond to journalists’ questions about the statement on the official website. But he said the city’s Norouz budget was about $494,000 this year.
Meanwhile, the anti-corruption agency announced that it will probe the allegations of corruption.
Written by Farangis Najibullah based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service
As pro-democracy supporters marched down the streets of Minsk on March 25, a reporter did a video interview with Nina Bahinskaya, a frail yet fiery veteran of protests in Belarus for decades.
As Bahinskaya speaks while she walks, a chilling scene plays out a few meters behind her. A woman — later identified as film student Maria Tsikhanava — is quickly approached by what appears to be a black-clad, balaclava-wearing Belarusian security officer, who grabs her and whisks her away, all in a few seconds and all unbeknownst to Bahinskaya, who marches on.
Belarusian leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya had hoped the rally on March 25 — or Freedom Day, as it is also the day commemorating the founding of a short-lived democratic Belarusian republic more than 100 years ago — would breathe new life into the country’s protest movement demanding Alyaksandr Lukashenka, in power since 1994, step down.
The country has been rocked by protests since Lukashenka claimed a landslide victory and a sixth straight term in an August presidential election that many Belarusians believe was rigged in his favor. Supporters of Tsikhanouskaya, a political novice who was buoyed by big crowds at campaign rallies, was the actual winner. She is now in exile in neighboring Lithuania.
Tens of thousands marched in the wake of the disputed vote, but those numbers have dwindled in the last few months. Winter weather and weariness have contributed, but the incident filmed on the streets of Minsk on March 25 highlights the huge risk Belarusians take in coming out to voice opposition to Lukashenka.
More than 33,000 have been detained, hundreds beaten on the streets or in detention, some described by rights groups as torture, at least four people have been killed, and independent reporters targeted in the government crackdown. “The Belarusian authorities are conducting a targeted campaign of intimidation against civil society in an effort to silence all critics of the government,” Human Rights Watch said on March 18 in a statement.
Crushing Protests
Ahead of the planned action, the commander of Interior Ministry troops, Mikalay Karpyankou, described Belarusian protesters as “enemies of our state,” before vowing to “deal with them quickly,” and harshly as in the past “with pleasure.”
Crisis In Belarus
Read our coverage as Belarusians continue to demand the resignation of Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid a brutal crackdown on protesters. The West refuses to recognize him as the country’s legitimate leader after an August 9 election considered fraudulent.
Ivan Tertel, the head of the KGB, told Lukashenka on March 9 that foreign actors were applying “unprecedented pressure on our state,” claiming — without providing evidence — that plans had been discovered to “destabilize the situation” in Belarus on March 25-27.
State-run TV had aired footage of Interior Ministry forces drilling ahead of the planned demonstrations. On March 25, police and army officers, police vans, military vehicles, were out in force across Minsk in a not so subtle hint to the public to stay away.
Lukashenka’s government has justified its actions by casting protesters as pawns of foreign forces and being bent on causing havoc.
To avoid being swept up in any mass police crackdown, the Nexta Telegram channel, which has mobilized and coordinated demonstrations, had urged protesters to march through courtyards and organize flash mobs.
Even with less-concentrated crowds, the Belarusian human rights monitor Vyasna said a total of 245 people were detained in 23 cities and towns across Belarus on March 25, including 176 in Minsk.
Franak Viacorka, an adviser to Tsikhanouskaya, said there had been “hundreds of actions,” including fireworks, flash mobs, performances, and courtyard rallies, but acknowledged the “tanks and armored vehicles” deployed by Lukashenka, had “frightened” people along with the earlier repressions and beatings. “It is clear this all had an impact on the number of people [who turned out on March 25],” Viacorka told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
Growing International Pressure
While Lukashenka may for now “control the streets,” as Tsikhanouskaya herself acknowledged in February, he is losing what leverage he had left on the international stage, at least in the West.
The UN’s top human rights body on March 24 voted to investigate allegations of widespread human rights abuses in Belarus. Russia, which has close ties to Belarus and has helped prop up Lukashenka since the disputed election, was one of the countries to vote against the measure.
UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet has been asked to lead the investigation aiming to bring alleged perpetrators to justice. The rights council authorized a budget of $2.5 million and the hiring of 20 experts and staff to carry out the investigation.
Washington, subdued in its criticism under former President Donald Trump, has become more vocal under President Joe Biden. On March 25, the U.S. State Department demanded the immediate release of the more than 290 political prisoners in Belarus, and highlighted the plight of Ihar Losik and Maryya Kalesnikava.
Kalesnikava, who faces national-security charges that supporters say are absurd, had her pretrial detention extended on March 22. Arrested in September, Kalesnikava, a key aide to Tsikhanouskaya and a senior member of the opposition’s Coordination Council, was ordered to remain in detention until May 8.
Losik, a popular blogger and RFE/RL consultant, has been held since June on charges his supporters say are trumped up. He had been charged initially with allegedly using his popular Telegram channel to “prepare to disrupt public order” ahead of the August 9 presidential election.
Losik, 28, tried to slit his wrists and launched a four-day hunger strike on March 11 after being informed he faced new unspecified charges.
The statement by State Department spokesman Ned Price came a day after the top two members of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee also called for the release of all political prisoners in Belarus and pledged their support for the pro-democracy movement in the country. “We will continue to support the Belarusian people’s democratic aspirations until the illegitimate Lukashenka steps down, all political prisoners — including RFE/RL consultant Ihar Losik — are released and, new free and fair elections are held,” Representatives Gregory Meeks (Democrat-New York) and Representative Michael McCaul (Republican-Texas) said in a statement.
The European Union, United States, Canada, and other countries have refused to recognize the 66-year-old as the legitimate leader of Belarus and have slapped him and senior Belarusian officials with sanctions in response to the “falsification” of the vote and postelection crackdown.
Angry Neighbors
On March 25, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania imposed travel bans on another 118 Belarusian officials. The first round of bans since November expands the list of the sanctioned, already containing Lukashenka, to a total of 274, the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry said.
Lukashenka also faces worsening relations with Poland, which accuses Belarus of persecuting the ethnic Polish community.
Andrzej Poczobut, a journalist and a member of the Association of Poles in Belarus was detained in Hrodna early on March 25, two days after the association’s leader, Andzelika Borys, was arrested and sentenced to 15 days in jail. The arrest came amid a worsening standoff following tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions this month, including the heads of the Polish consulates in Brest and Hrodna.
And while Belarusians may be for now reluctant to return to the street, more than 750,000 have added their signature to an online campaign launched by Tsikhanouskaya to demand Lukashenka enter internationally mediated talks on ending the political crisis.
Nexta has called for mass protests on March 27, casting it as “the day we start the second wave of street protests.”
Despite the fear instilled by the Lukashenka government crackdown, Viacorka is convinced it is only a matter of time before Belarusians turn out in larger numbers.
“People need to be shoulder to shoulder with one another, to see again that they are the majority, to feel that energy they got from those large marches,” he said.
With reporting by Current Time and RFE/RL’s Belarus Service
Suspected Russian state-backed hackers with a history of running disinformation campaigns against NATO have targeted dozens of German lawmakers, German media reported on March 26.
The hackers used spear-phishing e-mails to target the private e-mail accounts of members of the German parliament and regional state assemblies, in the latest suspected Russian-backed effort against lawmakers in the country.
Public broadcaster WDR and news website Der Spiegel reported that the attacks occurred in recent days and were noticed by the BfV domestic intelligence agency and the country’s information security agency.
It was unclear what, if any data, was stolen. WDR reported at least some e-mail accounts were compromised. Der Spiegel reported at least seven members of parliament were targeted and 31 lawmakers in state assemblies.
German security officials believe the cyberattack was carried out by a group known as Ghostwriter, long suspected of ties to Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.
WDR said officials are now warning of possible disinformation campaigns stemming from the cyberattack.
According to the U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye, since at least 2017 Ghostwriter has run information operations as part of a Russian influence campaign. The operations have primarily targeted the Baltic states and Poland, with a focus on producing disinformation about NATO.
The Ghostwriter campaign has “leveraged website compromises or spoofed e-mail accounts to disseminate fabricated content, including falsified news articles, quotes, correspondence, and other documents designed to appear as coming from military officials and political figures in the target countries,” FireEye said in an analysis last year.
For example, Ghostwriter is believed to be behind spreading fake news in 2018 about German soldiers participating in the NATO mission in Lithuania desecrating a Jewish graveyard and running over a child with a tank.
In 2015, suspected Russian hackers tied to the GRU carried out a massive cyberattack on the German parliament, disrupting IT systems and stealing troves of data. The e-mail accounts of several members of parliament, including in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office, were affected.
Migrants and refugees at the Krnjaca Asylum Center in Belgrade received their first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine against the coronavirus on March 26. Sixty-seven out of the 336 people at the center near the Serbian capital applied for the vaccination. Immunization is taking place at 18 reception centers across Serbia, with a total of 500 adults registered for vaccination out of 4,883 refugees and migrants.
“Did they want to kill him?” wondered Jamison Firestone in a November 2009 interview with RFE/RL’s Russian Service. “I don’t know.”
Firestone was the managing partner of Firestone Duncan, a Moscow law firm that hired Sergei Magnitsky to look into suspicions of massive tax fraud and theft in the takeover of companies belonging to the investment firm Hermitage Capital Management. Magnitsky died after 358 days in a Moscow pretrial-remand prison on November 16, 2009. He had not been charged with any crime.
“Magnitsky showed that a group of Interior Ministry officers were guilty of embezzling from the state budget the sum of $230 million,” Firestone said. “And these officers were among the group that arrested him. They did this in order to silence him. After his arrest, they had to justify their actions and create some accusations. It took them 10 months to fabricate their nonsensical story,” he said. “Clearly, the investigators were trying to force him to confess to things that were not true.”
‘A Deliberate Strategy’
Magnitsky, who was 37, had repeatedly said he was being denied medical treatment, and rights activists said his mistreatment amounted to torture.
More than a decade later, supporters of imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny are issuing increasingly alarming warnings that Navalny’s health has deteriorated in the weeks since his arrest upon returning to Russia from Germany in January and particularly since he was moved to a prison in the Vladimir region earlier this month.
Navalny lawyer Vadim Kobzev accused the authorities of “a deliberate strategy…to undermine his health,” while Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, said her husband’s treatment was “personal revenge” for his political activity.
Navalny had been in Germany since August 2020, when he was flown there for treatment following a near-fatal poisoning with a Novichok-type nerve agent on a trip to Siberia. He has blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the incident, which open-source investigators have argued was carried out by a team of Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives. In December, Navalny claimed he had duped one of the alleged FSB operatives, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, into confessing to participating in the poisoning during a 49-minute telephone conversation in which Navalny posed as a Kremlin official.
Navalny has complained of severe back pain and a loss of sensation in his right leg that has made it “practically nonfunctional.” He did not appear for a scheduled meeting with his lawyers on March 24. The following day, Russian prison officials issued a terse statement saying that Navalny’s health was “stable” and “satisfactory.”
After being allowed to see him, his lawyers disputed that claim, with one saying his condition was “extremely unfavorable.”
In two recent letters to the authorities that were made public on March 25, Navalny charged that his jailers were torturing him through sleep deprivation and withholding medical treatment in a deliberate effort to harm his health.
“This is exact deja-vu from the Magnitsky case,” wrote Hermitage Capital CEO and head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign Bill Browder in a post on Twitter on March 25. “The medical neglect that Putin is inflicting on Alexei Navalny is deliberate and Putin wants the world to know he’s doing it.”
‘A Torture Chamber’
Speaking to RFE/RL in 2009, just a month before Magnitsky’s death, Browder noted the prisoner’s deteriorating health. “He has been in custody for 11 months now,” he said. “He has not been granted one single visit with his family. He has lost 18 kilograms.”
“Sergei Magnitsky was held in the pretrial jail under inhuman conditions,” Firestone said in the interview conducted shortly after Magnitsky’s death. “He had serious health problems, including a serious digestive illness. The prison knew perfectly well about this because at first they gave him medical help. Later the authorities began pressuring him to force him to give false testimony. So they stopped giving him medical treatment. They took away his medications. They refused to allow him to consult with his doctor. Magnitsky complained about this many times. During this time, he lost more than 20 kilograms.”
Magnitsky filed many complaints about his treatment, Firestone added. “Just the list of his complaints about this takes up four pages,” he said.
Although Magnitsky was transferred to Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina jail on the day of his death, he spent most of his imprisonment in the notorious Cell Block No. 2 of the Butyrka remand prison. Roman Popkov was an activist with the illegal radical leftist National Bolshevik movement who spent two years in the same building at Butyrka and was released the year before Magnitsky’s death.
“As I read his diaries, I understood that nothing has changed in the last year,” he told RFE/RL in December 2009. “I could see this cell block remained a torture chamber.”
“They throw people in there with a single aim — to convince them deep down of their complete helplessness in the face of the system,” Popkov added. “The police investigations unit sends them to Butyrka and the Butyrka administration sends them into those basements so that they will be more agreeable with the investigators and the court.”
According to The New York Times, at 11 a.m. on November 16, Butyrka prison doctor Larisa Litvinova ordered Magnitsky’s transfer to Matrosskaya Tishina because his health situation had become urgent. After six hours, an ambulance arrived for him. He arrived at 6:30 p.m. A doctor prescribed him a painkiller, ordered a psychiatric evaluation, and left. Staff found him unconscious on his cell floor at 9:20 p.m. and he was pronounced dead half an hour later.
The official cause of death was given as toxic shock and heart failure brought on by pancreatitis.
In an open letter to the Russian government in March 2010, human rights activist and then-head of the Moscow Helsinki Group Lyudmila Alekseyeva wrote that Magnitsky’s death “resulted from willfully cruel treatment.”
“Torture was used by officers of the Interior Ministry as a method to pressure Mr. Sergei Magnitsky in the course of the investigation of a criminal case,” Alekseyeva wrote. “Mr. Sergei Magnitsky died from torture that was willfully inflicted on him.”
An initial investigation by the Kremlin’s advisory Human Rights Council concluded that Magnitsky had been severely beaten and denied treatment.
Hitting Rights Abusers ‘Where It Hurts Most’
After years of international campaigning by Browder and others, the United States in 2012 passed the original Magnitsky Act that allowed Washington to impose targeted sanctions on individuals in Russia accused of human rights violations. In 2015, the United States adopted the Global Magnitsky Act that extended the same penalties to alleged rights abusers in other countries.
The anti-corruption NGO Global Witness has called the U.S. Magnitsky laws “an important tool” in the fight against abuses. “It’s a successful example of concrete action being taken against the corrupt and the worst human rights abusers, hitting them where it hurts most — in their pocket,” Global Witness wrote in December 2019.
Over the next few years, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and others adopted similar legislation. The EU’s European Magnitsky Act was adopted in December 2020.
Taken together, the laws “fundamentally changed the role of targeted financial measures in the global fight against human rights abuses and corruption,” Atlantic Council senior fellow Hagar Hajjar Chemali wrote after the EU adopted the measure.
“The EU has said it would impose its first round of sanctions under this law at the beginning of 2021 and it is expected that Russian targets involved not only in the death of Sergei Magnitsky but also those tied to the recent attempted murder of key Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny will be included,” Chemali wrote. “Navalny has encouraged the EU to target Russian oligarchs and those close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in particular because of the assets and estates they have in Europe.”
On March 24, Browder posted on Twitter: “Alexei Navalny says health has sharply deteriorated in jail. This is how the hell that Putin has in store for him begins. I’ve seen it before with Sergei Magnitsky and its horrific. We must be ready to sanction a lot more Putin regime people.”
After the United Kingdom imposed Magnitsky Act sanctions on 25 Russians and 20 Saudis allegedly involved in laundering “blood money” in July 2020, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab lauded the new diplomatic tool.
“I think it’s absolutely right, particularly as a tool of foreign policy, that we subject the individuals responsible for…abuses — whether it’s torture, extrajudicial killing, or whatever it may be — to asset freezes and visa bans,” Raab told Reuters at the time. “I think it’s right as a statement of our international posture to say that we don’t want people responsible for these appalling crimes, with blood on their hands, coming to this country, doing their Christmas shopping in Knightsbridge or the King’s Road or trying to invest in British banks or British property.”
On March 26, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed most of the parallels between the Magnitsky case and Navalny’s. He noted, however, that Magnitsky was posthumously convicted of large-scale tax evasion in July 2013, in what observers believe was the first-ever posthumous trial in Russia’s modern history.
“We don’t see any parallels,” Peskov said, “apart from the fact that unfortunately, the deceased Magnitsky was convicted and sentenced. Navalny is also convicted and sentenced.”
Navalny has been convicted at two trials on financial-crimes charges that he and supporters contend were fabricated to blunt his challenge to Putin. They also contend that the parole-violation claim that resulted in his current prison term is absurd and unfounded.
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.”
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.
Russian law enforcement officers play a key role in the industrial-scale theft of oil from the nation’s network of pipelines, an illicit business that robs the public coffers of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and wreaks damage on the environment, a new RFE/RL investigation shows. By Sergei Khazov-Cassia
Vladimir is less than two hours by train from Moscow but average wages in the city pale by comparison. It is in such places that jailed opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s beleaguered movement is working to highlight corruption and change mindsets despite unrelenting pressure from the Russian state. By Matthew Luxmoore
In the city of Ovruch in the Zhytomyr region of Ukraine, the number of patients with COVID-19 continues to grow and the government has already designated the region a “red zone” for its high rate of new cases. RFE/RL visited the regional hospital and spoke with Viktoria Lytkivska, a doctor who has been treating patients since the start of the pandemic. Over 30,000 COVID-19-related deaths have so far been recorded in the country, with infections now at their highest level since November. By RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service and Neil Bowdler
In 1999, Saeed Zinali was arrested amid student protests that rocked Iran. More than two decades later, his mother continues to search for him. By RFE/RL’s Radio Farda
Russia’s remote Kurgan region, near Kazakhstan, is the location of about one-sixth of the country’s uranium reserves. A subsidiary of the state nuclear agency is expanding its operations there, using sulfuric acid to leach out the uranium ore. But for many local residents, the growth of the mines means not greater wealth, but greater dangers. By Harutyun Mansuyan and Current Time’s Unknown Russia
RFE/RL spoke with three Russians from the Urals region who emigrated from Russia after despairing that their efforts to reform their country would produce no good. By Yelena Shukayeva and Robert Coalson
Raman Bandarenka died from his injuries after being beaten up by masked men in November 2020, but the authorities in Belarus claimed he was drunk before he was detained by police. It was the start of an alleged cover-up that has seen a doctor jailed for disclosing that there was no alcohol in his body and evidence that senior regime figures were at the scene when Bandarenka was attacked. By Ray Furlong, Current Time, and RFE/RL’s Belarus Service
When the KGB sanctioned the opening of the Leningrad Rock Club in March 1981, it probably had no idea that this small, “alternative” venue would become synonymous with the tumultuous changes that swept through the Soviet Union just a few years later. By Coilin O’Connor
They come from Ukraine, Moldova, and Kyrgyzstan — and they have been deported from Russia for joining peaceful protests in support of jailed opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. They are now divided from their Russian wives and children. The head of a parliamentary commission into alleged foreign interference in Russian affairs said any foreigners involved in demonstrations should face automatic deportation. By Ray Furlong and Current Time
Competition between Beijing and Washington will shape the supercontinent, but Eurasia won’t be a flashpoint for tensions between the two world powers. By Reid Standish
To receive Steve Gutterman’s Week In Russia via e-mail every Friday, subscribe by clicking here. We’ve updated the format, so don’t be surprised if it looks slightly different when it lands in your in-box. And please check your spam folder if you didn’t receive it. If you have thoughts or feedback, you can reach us directly at newsletters@rferl.org.
The peculiarities of Putin’s propaganda were in the spotlight as a Siberian sojourn in sheepskin is captured on camera, while his alleged COVID-19 vaccination is not. Also unseen: imprisoned Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny, whose lawyers raised the alarm about his treatment, saying he is in severe pain and accusing the authorities of a “deliberate campaign” to undermine his health.
And as the State Duma passed legislation formalizing Putin’s option of seeking two more terms as president — a change that analysts say has emboldened already powerful security agencies and police — new RFE/RL reports reveal further evidence of far-reaching ties between Russian law enforcement and the criminals it’s supposed to be catching.
Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.
Killer Coda
In the wake of an indirect but acrimonious exchange with U.S. President Joe Biden, Putin traveled to Siberia for a weekend in the woods with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, as he has done at least once in the past.
The cameras were rolling as Putin and Shoigu drove over snow-covered ground in a camouflaged all-terrain vehicle, drank tea from tin cups at a table in the open air, and checked out what one observer called the defense chief’s “bits of old wood collection.”
Some of Putin’s past action-man photo shoots have featured him bare-chested, but in this case more attention was paid to what he was wearing — a matching shearling coat and pants, lacking only a vest for a three-piece sheepskin suit — than to what he wasn’t.
Putin’s taiga time-out had apparently been planned earlier: He mentioned it when he challenged Biden to an “open discussion” — a debate, that is — saying that the weekend would be no good but that Friday or Monday would work. Biden’s response: “I’m sure we’ll talk at some point.”
As a propaganda exercise, it’s hard to imagine that Putin’s weekend activities could help move the needle much on his popularity ratings or hand Russian more confidence about their personal finances.
Propaganda Fail?
For example, such displays seem unlikely to affect the views of the 57 percent of Russian adults under 25, or the 51 percent from 25 to 40, who have decided they don’t want him to president after his current term ends in 2024, according to a survey by independent polling agency Levada Center.
But the Kremlin may have seen it as a way to showaudiences at home and abroad that Putin has priorities — namely, his own country — other than how to respond after Biden was asked whether he thought the Russian president was a killer and answered, “Mm-hmm, I do.”
Later in the week, Putin missed what many observers agreed was a chance to make a sizable impact with a brief on-camera appearance: More than seven months after he announced that the first of Russia’s three coronavirus vaccines was approved for use, he was inoculated against COVID-19 on March 23, according to the Kremlin – but not on camera.
Given the trouble his government has had getting Russian citizens behind the idea that they should be vaccinated, and ensuring there are doses on hand when they do, refraining from getting the shot in public seemed hard to explain. It sparked speculation about his motives and whether he was vaccinated at all.
Putin was not shy about showing this doctor’s consultation after he reportedly injured his shoulder during judo practice in 2011. But he would not allow cameras to record his alleged coronavirus vaccination on March 23.
Russia has aggressively marketed the vaccine abroad, signaling even with its name — a nod to the satellite that stunned the West and heated up the U.S.-Soviet space race in 1957 — that the Kremlin sees distribution of vaccines as a competition.
But less than 5 percent of Russian adults have received both doses of a two-shot vaccine. In late December, a poll conducted by the Levada Center found that 58 percent of Russians were not prepared to be vaccinated with Sputnik V, which Putin announced on August 11 had received regulatory approval — the first in the world.
Russia has recorded nearly 4.5 million coronavirus cases since the pandemic began in early 2020 — fourth in the world after the United States, Brazil, and India, which have much bigger populations.
Distractions
Its official death toll reached 96,612 on March 25, but state mortality statistics indicate that the real number of coronavirus-related deaths is more than 200,000, and some researchers suspect it is still higher.
In any case, Putin’s appearances and nonappearances may have served to draw attention away from far more momentous developments — and that may have been the point, at least in part, as it often is.
One such development was a technicality: The State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, passed a bill that will align electoral legislation with a change that was inserted into the constitution last year, after a choreographed campaign and a controversial nationwide vote, enabling Putin to seek two more six-year terms as president, in 2024 and 2030.
When the constitutional amendments were in the works, heading for certain adoption, political analysts and rights activists predicted that one result would be to embolden law enforcement and security agencies, such as the Federal Security Service (FSB).
At the time, Georgy Satarov, a Moscow think-tank head and former aide to Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, said that the changes figuratively sounded the death knell for the constitution, and that “when the constitution ceases to exist, one thing remains: power.”
An array of developments seems to have proved those predictions accurate. Some of them are connected to Navalny, Putin’s most prominent foe, who was poisoned with a powerful nerve agent in Siberia on August 20, less than two months after the constitutional amendments entered into force.
Navalny was flown to Germany for treatment and was arrested upon his return to Russia on January 17. His jailing, along with anger at Putin and his government over a range of issues, sparked nationwide protests later that month that were the biggest in years — and were met with one of the harshest police crackdowns in years.
‘Torture’
On February 2, Navalny was handed a 2 1/2-year prison sentence on a parole-violation claim he calls absurd, stemming from a conviction on financial-crimes charges he contends were fabricated. And on March 25, lawyers who visited him in prison after several delays said that he was in “extremely unfavorable” condition, with severe back pain and problems that made his right leg “practically nonfunctional.”
Navalny had been complaining of sharp back pain for the past month and was denied treatment, lawyer Vadim Kobzev tweeted, accusing his jailers of pursuing “a deliberate strategy to harm his health.” He asserted that they were “essentially subjecting him to torture by lack of sleep” and were giving him two ibuprofen tablets daily for the pain — treatment he said was “obvious mockery.”
A security guard outside Correctional Colony No. 2 where Navalny is being held, in the town of Pokrov, outside Moscow.
The Russian prison service, in what came across for many as something far closer to trolling than a reliable medical assessment, said that Navalny’s condition was “satisfactory.”
The concerns about Navalny’s health and treatment will draw comparisons with the fatal ordeal suffered by whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky, who died in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina jail in December 2009 after being denied medical treatment and subjected to abuse that he and rights activists said amounted to torture.
A 2012 U.S. law that enables Washington to impose sanctions on Russians deemed to have committed human rights abuses is called the Magnitsky Act, and other Western countries have passed similar legislation. Earlier in March, under different legislation, the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions on senior Russian officials — including the FSB director, the prosecutor-general, and the prison service chief — over the poisoning and jailing of Navalny.
In an Instagram post in which she said that “everyone who knows Aleksei knows that he would never complain until the last minute,” Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, wrote that his back problems began a month ago, when he was being held at Matrosskaya Tishina, and had worsened since his transfer to a prison in Pokrov, east of Moscow.
Navalny blames Putin for his near-fatal poisoning and, along with open-source investigative outfit Bellingcat and its media partners, has produced detailed evidence — including a phone call in which an operative appeared to admit involvement — indicating that it was carried out by the FSB.
In Cahoots
While the FSB, police, prosecutors, and other law enforcement agencies may be feeling increasingly emboldened, their outsize clout is nothing new: It’s been a phenomenon since Putin, a longtime Soviet KGB officer who head the FSB for a year in 1998-99, came to power months later.
In 1999, before Yeltsin stepped down on New Year’s Eve and made him acting president, Putin pledged to make Russia into a “dictatorship of law.” Kremlin critics say what has emerged instead is a country in which law enforcement and organized crime are deeply and seemingly inextricably intertwined.
Two recent RFE/RL reports have added to the evidence of those ties, which span a broad swath of economy sectors and have withstood several campaigns with the stated goal of curbing such corruption.
One describes how a forest ranger at a nature reserve near Lake Baikal helped arrest five suspected poachers — and found himself facing criminal charges for “exceeding his authority,” a turn of events activists say may have resulted from friendly ties between poachers and prosecutors, police, and local politicians.
The other is a detailed and revealing report grounded in a far-reaching investigation that captures the scale and scope of the theft of oil from pipelines in Russia and the role that law enforcement officers play in it.
‘Emblematic’
On a smaller scale, there’s the article that author and analyst Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security agencies, posted along with a seemingly rhetorical question: “How much of Putin’s Russia is encapsulated in this story?”
Assailants abducted a retired FSB general and tortured him until he led them to his home outside Moscow and dug up seven plastic containers in the yard that held about $5 million in a mix of currencies, the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomlets reported on March 25. Two suspects were caught, convicted of kidnapping and extortion, and sentenced to 10 years in prison apiece.
Meanwhile, with the testimony about containers stuffed with cash, the trial “attracted the attention of prosecutors” to the retired FSB officer’s undeclared wealth, which far exceeded the possibilities provided by his state salary and pension. In the end, the authorities seized a safe-deposit box holding $1.1 million and 5 million rubles ($66,000) as well as a house near Moscow valued at 36 million rubles ($475,000).
According to the business daily Kommersant, the retired general argued that his assailants had not taken any money from him. And the defendants claimed their confessions were extracted through torture.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is calling on French authorities to protect an exiled Azerbaijani video blogger who was stabbed more than 10 times in an attack in France 10 days ago and later received a threatening text message on his phone.
A refugee in France since 2016, Mahammad Mirzali was beaten and stabbed on March 14 by a group of men while walking in the western city of Nantes — the latest incident targeting the blogger or his family in what the Paris-based media freedom watchdog on March 24 called attempts to “silence” the blogger.
Mirzali had to undergo an operation that lasted “more than six hours,” Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk, said in a statement, adding that “the Azerbaijani regime is exporting its persecution of freedom of expression to France and to Europe.”
French police have not commented on their investigation.
“This is the last warning,” said the text in Azerbaijani that the blogger received on March 21, RSF said.
“We can kill you without any problem. You’ve seen that we’re not afraid of anyone…. If you continue to insult our sisters, we’ll have you killed with a bullet to the head fired by a sniper,” read the text, which was signed “Andres Gragmel.”
YouTube Channel
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Mirzali is “often targeted” because of the videos he posts on his YouTube channel, Made In Azerbaijan, in which he criticizes Azerbaijan’s authoritarian President Ilham Aliyev, his wife, Vice President Mehriban Aliyeva, and other members of their family.
In October 2020, several shots were fired at the blogger in Nantes.
His father and brother-in-law were detained in 2017. Police reportedly told the two men to pressure Mirzali to stop his criticism of the government.
“The regime also resorted to sex-tape blackmail,” RSF said, sending intimate images of one of his sisters to the entire family in early March and then circulating them via a Telegram channel.
Azerbaijan is ranked 168th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2020 World Press Freedom Index.
“Most critical media outlets have been silenced or have had to relocate abroad, the main independent websites are blocked, and at least two journalists are currently in prison,” RSF said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been vaccinated against COVID-19 and is feeling well, RIA said on March 23 citing the Kremlin, as authorities seek to encourage hesitant Russians to get the shot.
The Kremlin said earlier on March 23 that it had deliberately decided not to reveal the name of the Russian-made vaccine which Putin chose to take.
Putin had been criticized for being slow to get vaccinated in a country where there is widespread hesitance over the vaccine.
So far, some 4.3 million people in Russia have received both doses of a two-shot vaccine, which is less than 5 percent of the country’s 146 million people, putting Russia behind many other countries in its rollout.
Russia has the world’s fourth-highest number of coronavirus infections at 4.4 million, and the seventh-highest death toll from COVID-19 at 94,231.
The country has developed three COVID-19 vaccines — Sputnik V by the Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, EpiVacCorona, produced by the Vector Institute in Novosibirsk, and CoviVac, from the Chumakov Centre in St. Petersburg.
In August, Russia approved the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine, Sputnik V, prompting scientists around the world to question its safety and efficacy because it was registered before the results of Phase 3 studies were made available.
However, peer-reviewed, late-stage trial results published in The Lancet medical journal last month showed the two-dose regimen of Sputnik V was 91.6 percent effective against symptomatic COVID-19, about the same level as the leading Western-developed vaccines.
Still, a recent survey by the Levada Center, an independent polling agency, showed that the number of Russians hesitant to get the Sputnik V shot grew in February to 62 percent from 58 percent in December.
The EpiVacCorona and CoviVac vaccines also received regulatory approval before completing late-stage trials.
NATO foreign ministers have vowed that the Western alliance will continue to adapt in the face of “rising threats and systemic competition,” and underlined that “Russia’s aggressive actions constitute a threat to Euro-Atlantic security.”
“Assertive and authoritarian powers, and non-state actors, challenge the rules-based international order, including through hybrid and cyber threats, the malicious use of new technologies, as well as other asymmetric threats,” the ministers said in a joint statement issued on March 23 after a first day of talks in Brussels.
Earlier in the day, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is attending the two-day NATO gathering – the first face-to-face meeting of foreign ministers at the Western security alliance since 2019 — said China’s military rise and Russia’s attempts to destabilize the West were threats that required NATO to come together.
In their statement, the NATO ministers reaffirmed “the enduring transatlantic bond between Europe and North America, with NATO at its heart” — after four years of doubt and concern among some allies under the previous U.S. administration of President Donald Trump, who often criticized some allies for failing to pay their fair share of the defense burden.
The ministers also committed to Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, under which an attack against one ally shall be considered an attack against them all.
Noting that members of the 30-nation alliance “are making good progress on fairer trans-Atlantic burden sharing,” the NATO ministers welcomed “the efforts made by all Allies in Europe and North America that contribute to our indivisible security.”
On his first trip to Brussels, where he is also scheduled to hold talks with European Union leaders as part of U.S. President Joe Biden’s efforts to repair transatlantic ties, Blinken vowed Washington would work to rebuild and strengthen NATO.
“The United States wants to rebuild our partnerships, first and foremost with our NATO allies, we want to revitalize the alliance,” he told reporters as he met NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian welcomed Blinken’s statements, saying that NATO had “rediscovered” itself.
“There will be no European defense without NATO, and there will be no efficient and relevant NATO without Europeans,” he said at NATO headquarters.
An employee of the Russian Consulate in Strasbourg is suspected of selling dozens of stolen bicycles, French media reports said on March 22.
According to the reports, a 40-year-old driver for the Russian diplomatic mission was detained for questioning on February 14 but released 24 hours later as police pursued the investigation.
When police wanted to question the suspect for a second time later in February, they were informed by the consulate that he had returned to Russia for “health reasons.”
Police launched the probe after an expensive electric bicycle belonging to the former deputy mayor of Strasbourg, Alain Fontanel, was stolen on a street near Strasbourg’s diplomatic quarter.
Fontanel turned to police after he saw his bike offered for sale on the Leboncoin website several days later.
Police contacted the seller who agreed to sell the bike at a site just next to the Russian consulate.
The man had a fake receipt of purchase with a Russian consulate stamp along with Fontanel’s bike identified by its serial number later, and three other bikes.
Police found out later that some 300 ads for high-quality bikes had been posted on the Leboncoin site since January 2020, representing a potential value of up to 100,000 euros ($120,000).
The investigation continues as prosecutors weigh whether to proceed with a trial even if the suspect remains out of reach.
An employee of the Russian Consulate in Strasbourg is suspected of selling dozens of stolen bicycles, French media reports said on March 22.
According to the reports, a 40-year-old driver for the Russian diplomatic mission was detained for questioning on February 14 but released 24 hours later as police pursued the investigation.
When police wanted to question the suspect for a second time later in February, they were informed by the consulate that he had returned to Russia for “health reasons.”
Police launched the probe after an expensive electric bicycle belonging to the former deputy mayor of Strasbourg, Alain Fontanel, was stolen on a street near Strasbourg’s diplomatic quarter.
Fontanel turned to police after he saw his bike offered for sale on the Leboncoin website several days later.
Police contacted the seller who agreed to sell the bike at a site just next to the Russian consulate.
The man had a fake receipt of purchase with a Russian consulate stamp along with Fontanel’s bike identified by its serial number later, and three other bikes.
Police found out later that some 300 ads for high-quality bikes had been posted on the Leboncoin site since January 2020, representing a potential value of up to 100,000 euros ($120,000).
The investigation continues as prosecutors weigh whether to proceed with a trial even if the suspect remains out of reach.
MOSCOW — A Moscow book fair has prompted accusations of censorship after it canceled an appearance by a debut author who is a top aide to jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny.
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s longtime spokeswoman and a prominent activist in her own right, was set to present her novel Incredible Incidents In Women’s Cell No. 3 at the Non/Fiction book festival, which will be held at an exhibition space near the Kremlin from March 24 to 28.
But the book’s publisher, Corpus, revealed that its parent company had given in to pressure by the event’s organizers to withdraw Yarmysh’s appearance from the event.
“It’s the typical argument,” Corpus chief editor Varvara Gornostayeva wrote in a Facebook post on March 23. “We need to preserve the book fair at any price, and an appearance by a opposition figure, and Aleksei Navalny’s spokesperson at that, places the fair’s existence under threat.”
Vitaly Kogtyev, a representative of the book fair, confirmed the decision to withdraw Yarmysh’s invitation in comments to Russian media, though he did not cite a reason. Non/Fiction did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the event program published on its website includes no mention of Yarmysh or her book.
Kira Yarmysh (left) and Aleksei Navalny arrive for a meeting in 2015.
The controversial decision comes at a tense time for Russia’s opposition, and specifically Navalny and his regional network of campaign offices. The anti-corruption crusader incited a nationwide wave of protests in January that was brutally suppressed by police, and on February 2 he was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison over a parole violation charge he contends is absurd.
Since his return to Russia in mid-January after five months in Germany recovering from the effects of a nerve-agent poisoning he blames on President Vladimir Putin, Navalny’s movement has faced a targeted campaign against its activists and coordinators throughout Russia, some of whom are in custody or face criminal prosecution in connection with rallies.
Last week, Navalny’s award nomination for a series of investigative documentaries revealing evidence of corruption among the country’s top officials prompted a bitter conflict in Russia’s filmmaking community and led the Russian Guild of Film Critics to drop its prestigious cinema prize.
Yarmysh’s book, about six women who share stories while stuck in a jail cell, came out in the fall. Since February 2, she has been under house arrest pending trial on charges that she and nine other defendants created a risk to public health by promoting the January protests.
On March 18, a Moscow court extended her confinement by another three months, rendering her incapable of attending the scheduled book presentation even if it had gone ahead.
Yarmysh faces up to two years in prison if she’s convicted, and she is banned from communicating online. But in a post to her Facebook account, published by her aides, she issued a scathing assessment of the decision, calling it “base and cowardly” and a case of “direct collaboration with the authorities.”
“Censorship and self-censorship are among the worst traits of authoritarianism,” she wrote. “This can’t be explained with any virtuous intention to ‘save the book fair’…. On the contrary, silent tolerance of a division between permitted and prohibited writers is what will sooner or later destroy it.”
PODGORICA – Prosecutors in Montenegro say they have opened a preliminary investigation into the alleged disclosure of classified information by the head of the National Security Agency (ANB), Dejan Vuksic.
“The case is in the preliminary phase,” a spokeswoman for the Higher State Prosecutor’s Office (VDT) in Podgorica, Lepa Medenica, told RFE/RL on March 23.
The leader of the opposition Social Democratic Party (SDP) and member of the parliament’s Security and Defense Committee, Rasko Konjevic, claimed on March 19 that Vuksic violated the law on data secrecy and compromised classified information of a NATO ally by sharing secret data with committee members earlier that day.
According to the deputy prime minister in charge of security matters, Dritan Abazovic, Vuksic “made a mistake” by revealing secret information.
But Prime Minister Zdravko Krivokapic defended the head of the secret service on March 21, saying that during the Security and Defense Committee meeting he disclosed data from an internal ANB document — not from a NATO member state.
Some reports said that the classified information dealt with CIA operatives.
Montenegro joined the Western alliance in 2017.
Vuksic was appointed to the helm of the secret service in mid-December by Krivokapic’s government in a move strongly opposed by the opposition, which argued that ANB officials should not be members of a political party or carry out political activities.
Vuksic topped the candidate list of the coalition For the Future of Kotor in local elections in August 2020.
The coalition was part of a broader coalition led by the Democratic Front (DF) in the parliamentary vote that was held on the same day and brought Krivokapic to power.
The team of jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny is making a new push to free the anti-corruption campaigner with plans for the largest anti-Kremlin protest in Russia’s modern history.
In an announcement on Navalny’s website on March 23, the team said the date and site of the rally will be announced once at least 500,000 people express their willingness to participate.
The group also launched a special website to register those who would like to take part in the event as part of the push to get Navalny released from prison.
Leonid Volkov, the coordinator of Navalny’s network of teams, said that some 60,000 people had signed up to the event within hours of the website going operational.
“You know who our biggest enemy is? No, not Putin. Putin can’t stop the wonderful Russia of the future however much he wants to. Our main enemy is indifference, apathy and apoliticism,” Volkov said.
Leonid Volkov
Navalny’s associates and supporters have been under pressure since the 44-year-old Kremlin critic was arrested on January 17 as he arrived from Germany where he had ben treated for a poisoning attack with what was determined by several European labs as a Novichok-like nerve agent.
Thousands rallied across Russia on January 23 and January 31 in protest at Navalny’s detention. Police violently put down the protests, arresting almost 10,000 people in the process.
On February 2, Navalny was found guilty of violating the terms of his suspended sentence relating to an embezzlement case that he has called politically motivated.
The court converted the sentence to 3 1/2 years in prison. Given credit for time already spent in detention, the court said the Kremlin critic would have to serve 2 years and 8 months behind bars.
The ruling sparked new mass protests across the country that were also violently dispersed by police.
Another 1,400 people were detained by police in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other Russian cities on that day.
Navalny is currently being held in Correctional Colony No. 2, known as one of the toughest prisons in Russia.
The push also comes as Russians prepare to head to the polls in parliamentary elections in September where they hope to derail the ruling United Russia party’s stranglehold on power.
Navalny and his supporters have developed a “smart voting” system, which is aimed at undercutting United Russia candidates.
Under the system, voters can enter their address into a special app, which will then give them a list of the candidates deemed most likely to defeat their United Russia rivals regardless of their party affiliation.
The U.S. State Department says Secretary of State Antony Blinken has “strongly condemned” recent attacks against Saudi territory from “Iranian-aligned groups” in the region, and discussed cooperation to end the war in Yemen in a call with Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister.
During his March 22 conversation with Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, Blinken also “reiterated our commitment to supporting the defense” of U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, the department said in a statement.
It said the two discussed “their close cooperation to support the efforts of UN Special Envoy Griffiths and U.S. Special Envoy Lenderking to end the conflict in Yemen, starting with the need for all parties to commit to a cease-fire and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid.”
The phone call came as Saudi Arabia presented a new peace initiative to end the Yemeni conflict, widely seen as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, including a nationwide cease-fire under UN supervision and the reopening of air and sea links.
The offer was welcomed by the UN and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government based in the southern port of Aden, but the Iranian-aligned Shi’ite Huthi rebels said the initiative provided “nothing new” as did not appear to go far enough to lift a blockade.
The Saudi initiative would include the reopening of Sanaa airport, and would allow fuel and food imports through Hodeidah port, both of which are controlled by the Huthis.
Saudi Arabia has been under increasing pressure to put an end to the six-year Yemeni conflict since U.S. President Joe Biden signaled Washington would no longer support Riyadh’s military intervention in the country.
Yemen was plunged into a civil war in 2015 that has killed some 130,000 people and displaced more than 3 million Yemenis.
The Huthis have launched drone and missile attacks targeting the Saudi kingdom’s oil infrastructure and other sites.
Earlier this month, the UN said around 16 million Yemenis, more than half the population, were going hungry. Of those, 5 million are on the brink of famine.
In its statement, the U.S. State Department said Blinken and his Saudi counterpart also discussed “the importance of stabilizing the Yemeni economy.”
The state secretary “underscored the importance of continued progress on human rights and expressed support for Saudi Arabia’s ongoing social and economic reforms,” it said.
Russia’s ambassador to the United States returned to Moscow on March 21 following his recall for emergency consultations amid rising tensions with Washington after President Joe Biden said he believed his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin was a “killer.”
Biden’s remark in a TV interview earlier in the week in turn prompted a terse quip from Vladimir Putin who wished the U.S. president “good health” and said that people tend to refer to others as they really see themselves.
The Biden interview came on the heels of the release of a report by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence that concluded Putin had “authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President [Donald] Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the United States.”
The Kremlin immediately denied the findings of the report, saying they were “absolutely unfounded.”
Ambassador Anatoly Antonov landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport early on March 21, Russian news agencies reported, after he was recalled last week over the spat.
Before takeoff in New York he told agencies he would stay in Moscow “as along as needed” and that several meetings were scheduled.
“The Russian side has always stressed that we are interested in the development of Russian-American relations to the same extent as our American colleagues are,” he was quoted as saying by TASS.
Moscow, which rarely recalls ambassadors, last summoned its envoy in the United States in 1998 over a Western bombing campaign in Iraq.
In 2014, after the U.S. said Russia would face repercussions for the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, Putin held back on recalling Moscow’s envoy, describing the measure as a “last resort.”
Over the winter, fewer Belarusians have taken to the streets to demand the ouster of longtime authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid cold weather, a brutal government crackdown, and perhaps fatigue.
Opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya lamented in February that the pro-democracy movement had “lost the streets,” but vowed to seek a revival come spring — starting with a nationwide rally on March 25, which coincides with Freedom Day, the anniversary of a short-lived Belarusian republic founded in 1918.
Lukashenka shows no signs of willingness to compromise, however, and his top security officials have vowed to deal harshly with any new large-scale protests.
Belarus has been in turmoil since Lukashenka, who has been in power since 1994, claimed a landslide victory and a sixth term in the presidential election that millions of Belarusians believe was fixed. The vote followed large rallies across the country that pointed to strong support for Tsikhanouskaya, and her backers contend that she was the actual winner despite an official tally of 10 percent.
No ballot held under Lukashenka has been deemed free, fair, and democratic by impartial international observers.
Since the election, more than 30,000 people have been arrested, hundreds beaten in detention and during demonstrations, and at least four people have been killed in the government crackdown. Allegations of torture abound. Lukashenka and his inner circle have been put under sanctions by the West, which also refused to recognize him as the legitimate leader of Belarus, prompting him to turn to ally Russia even more for support.
On March 18, Tsikhanouskaya, who left for Lithuania under intense pressure from the state after the election, announced an online campaign to demand Lukashenka enter into talks with Belarus’s democratic movement. She proposes that the talks be mediated by the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
“Each of you knows the country is in crisis and it can only be resolved peacefully thru internationally mediated talks,” Tsikhanouskaya said in a statement.
She said the online vote initiative also had the backing of the Coordination Council, which is tasked with overseeing a hoped-for democratic transition, and By_Pol, which brings together former Belarusian security officers and officials who have switched over to the opposition, as well as other democratic forces.
Tsikhanouskaya said that the more Belarusians vote in the online campaign, “the louder the world will hear our demand to resolve the crisis peacefully without any more victims.” She excoriated Lukashenka for “spitting in the face of millions of Belarusians” by refusing to step down after the August 9 election.
As of March 19, some 460,000 people had added their names to support the calls for dialogue on the independent platform Golos, which launched in Belarus last year to monitor the disputed presidential election and is overseeing the online vote.
Tsikhanouskaya’s appeal to Belarusians came a day after she spoke at a videoconference hearing of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, urging Washington to step up sanctions by targeting judges, state-owned enterprises, security officers, government-friendly tycoons, and educational and sports officials.
“People are suffering and dying now. Belarusians, more than ever, need your help,” she told the hearing on March 17.
Will The Crowds Return?
Lukashenka’s opponents could face a hard road ahead.
Crisis In Belarus
Read our coverage as Belarusians continue to demand the resignation of Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid a brutal crackdown on protesters. The West refuses to recognize him as the country’s legitimate leader after an August 9 election considered fraudulent.
The chances of recreating the crowds that swelled to over 100,000 in the early days of the protests after the disputed vote are doubtful, argues Kamil Klysinski, a senior fellow at the Warsaw-based OSW Center for Eastern Studies. “[Belarusian] people are indeed tired, disappointed and first of all intimidated by the huge repression which we observe within recent months,” Klysinski said in e-mailed comments.
Belarus is undergoing a “human rights crisis of unprecedented dimension,” said a report that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet submitted to the UN Human Rights Council on February 25.
The mass protests were met with “mass arbitrary arrests and detentions” of largely peaceful demonstrators, along with “hundreds of allegations of torture and ill-treatment,” Bachelet said in comments that day to a Geneva forum, adding that “not one of the hundreds of complaints for acts of torture and ill-treatment” had been investigated.
Harsh Sentences
In a posthumous ruling issued the same day, a court in Belarus found Henadz Shutau, who was killed by security forces in August 2020, guilty of disobeying police orders.
Human Rights Watch on February 17 said that law enforcement the day before had conducted nationwide raids targeting human rights defenders and activists, searching their homes and offices and detaining at least 40 people.
More than 400 people have been convicted “in connection with participation in illegal mass events and protests that grossly violate public order,” the Belarusian Prosecutor-General’s Office said on March 17. Prosecutors listed examples of people they had pursued, including a 35-year-old man who had “posted insulting comments against law enforcement on the Odnoklassniki social network.” The highest sentence handed out was 10 years.
Journalist Katsyaryna Barysevich (right) and doctor Artsyom Sarokin stand inside a defendants’ cage during a court hearing in Minsk on March 2 in their trial for sharing information about a slain protester.
Last month, 16-year-old Mikita Zalatarou, who suffers from epilepsy, was sentenced to five years in a juvenile prison for participating in what authorities described as “mass riots.” The Belarusian human rights monitor Vyasna lists him as a political prisoner.
On March 16, blogger Ihar Losik, who was arrested in June 2020 on charges of preparing public disorder ahead of the August vote, ended a hunger strike and was placed in solitary confinement. Losik, who is a consultant to RFE/RL on new-media technologies, tried to slit his wrists and launched the hunger strike on March 11 when new, unspecified charges were leveled against him.
‘Enemies Of The State’
Lukashenka’s government has justified its actions by casting protesters as pawns of foreign forces and being bent on causing havoc.
In a meeting with Lukashenka on March 9, Ivan Tertel, the head of the KGB state security agency, spoke of “unprecedented pressure on our state” by foreign actors, without elaborating. Without providing evidence, he claimed his agency had discovered plans to “destabilize the situation” in Belarus on March 25-27.
“Tertel said on state TV…that the KGB ‘knows everything’ about all preparations for the March 25 demonstrations and their reactions will be accordingly quite hard,” Klysinski said.
The commander of Interior Ministry troops, Mikalay Karpyankou, recently described Belarusian protesters as “enemies of our state,” before vowing to “deal with them quickly,” and harshly as in the past “with pleasure.”
Karpyankou is notorious for not only chasing down and beating protesters in Minsk, but has defended the use of firearms against them, and was apparently caught on audio discussing plans to build internment camps for those rounded up in the crackdown.
Karpyankou’s comments came as state TV reported that Interior Ministry troops were drilling for possible mass disorder, displaying some of the hardware that could be deployed in such cases.
With Belarusians facing growing repression and protest numbers down, Lukashenka remains defiant.
At a gathering of thousands of loyalists in Minsk in February, Lukashenka slammed the protests against his rule as a foreign-directed “rebellion,” and vowed that 2021 “will be decisive.”
“No transfer [of power] is possible in Belarus,” Lukashenka said on March 2, discussing his talks last month with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi. He said that a new constitution would be adopted early in 2022 but suggested that it would not lead to a transition away from his rule and added that a “transfer of power” was not on the agenda when he met with Putin.
‘Volcano Of Discontent’
The talks were the first time the two leaders had met in person since September 2020, when Putin extended $1.5 billion in state-backed loans to Lukashenka. The event was preceded by the signing of an agreement on the transshipment of Belarusian fuels (redirected from Lithuania) to Russian ports by the transport ministers of both countries in Moscow on February 19. There were rumors that Putin would extend a further $3 billion to Lukashenka’s government during their talks, but those were denied.
Belarus’s economy has been hit hard not only by the political turmoil, as businesses, especially the extremely profitable IT business, flee Belarus, but the COVID-19 pandemic, which Lukashenka has been accused of mishandling for his failure to enact any lockdown measures.
Lukashenka has other worries as well. The opposition-linked Telegram channel Nexta aired a documentary on March 8 detailing what it alleged to be his luxurious lifestyle, including 17 palatial residences, a fleet of luxury cars and watches, and a “harem.”
Besides the blow to his image as a man of the people, Lukashenka could face a challenge on the political front in his quest to curry favor with the Kremlin, which up till now has stuck with him, rejecting the Tsikhanouskaya-led opposition as Western puppets.
On March 6, the founding congress of the pro-Russian party Soyuz (Union) took place in Minsk. Soyuz casts itself as an opposition faction, favoring tighter Belarusian-Russian integration. Its chairman, Syarhey Lushch, has said the “violent dispersal of the very first protests in Minsk” had left “Lukashenka effectively illegitimate,” while calling for Russia to “play a more active role in stabilizing the situation.”
In the short term, Lukashenka may be able to deal with a fresh wave of protests, Klysinski said.
“But this doesn’t mean that Lukashenka has definitively won,” he added. “He is sitting on a ‘volcano’ of discontent felt by a majority of Belarusians, and he cannot be sure that everything is under full control.”
With reporting by RFE/RL’s Belarus Service and Current Time
Building railroads and roads will be “mutually beneficial” for Armenia and Azerbaijan, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said on March 20 during a visit to the country’s western Aragatsotn Province, as he attempted to ease concerns about the development of such infrastructure projects.
Addressing scores of supporters in the village of Nerkin Bazmaberd, Pashinian noted that one of the provisions of the trilateral statement signed by the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia ending last year’s war in Nagorno-Karabakh calls for the unblocking of “all economic and transport links” in the region.
This includes the construction of new roads and railroads linking the Azerbaijani exclave of Naxcivan with mainland Azerbaijan via Armenian territory.
A trilateral working group led by the deputy prime ministers of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia was formed in February to work on details of the projects.
The provision in the cease-fire agreement on establishing “economic and transport links” in the region raised concerns in Armenia about possible geopolitical and economic implications of such infrastructure projects passing through the country’s southern parts.
For now, the matter mainly concerns the construction of railroads and the road that would connect Naxcivan to mainland Azerbaijan, but energy facilities like pipelines could come into the picture at some point in the future.
Pashinian said the development of transportation infrastructure could be a step toward overcoming animosity in the region.
“If someone says that the opening of these roads is beneficial only for Azerbaijan, do not believe it. If someone says that the opening of transportation is beneficial only for Armenia, do not believe it either. The opening of transportation, especially in this situation, is beneficial for both Armenia and Azerbaijan,” he stressed.
“It is in Azerbaijan’s interest because it should get transportation with Naxcivan; it is in Armenia’s interest because we need a reliable railway link with the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he added.
Pashinian’s statement came two days after he announced early parliamentary elections in June.
During the rally, Pashinian did not conceal that his political team will seek a fresh mandate from the people to be able to form a government again. He said, however, that he and his team were ready to accept any outcome of the elections.
Pashinian and his government have come under fire from various opposition parties and groups over the Armenian defeat in last year’s war in Nagorno-Karabakh. They have demanded Pashinian’s resignation since the Russian-brokered cease-fire was signed on November 10, ending six weeks of hostilities in which thousands of soldiers were killed.
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 coalition of opposition parties has been holding anti-government demonstrations in Yerevan and other parts of the country in a bid to force Pashinian to step down and allow an interim government to be formed before snap elections.
But the prime minister, whose My Step alliance dominates parliament, has refused to hand over power to such an interim government.
Following discussions with the leaders of two opposition parliamentary factions, Pashinian said on March 18 that it was agreed that early elections in Armenia will be held on June 20.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has reiterated that U.S. allies should steer clear of purchasing Russian military equipment to avoid sanctions after a meeting on March 20 with his Indian counterpart.
“We certainly urge all our allies, our partners, to move away from Russian equipment…and really avoid any kind of acquisitions that would trigger sanctions on our behalf,” Austin told reporters in New Delhi.
Austin’s comment came after he and Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh discussed India’s planned purchase of Russia’s S-400 air-defense system. India made an initial payment in 2019 toward the purchase, and the first set of missile batteries are expected later this year.
Ahead of Austin’s trip, Senator Bob Menendez (Democrat-New Jersey), chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked him to reaffirm the Biden administration’s opposition to India’s planned purchase of the Russian system.
Menendez said in a letter to Austin that the purchase “threatens future U.S.-India defense cooperation and puts India at risk of sanctions.”
The United States last year imposed sanctions on Turkey for buying the S-400 system.
Austin’s two-day visit to India is the first by a top member of U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration. Washington is seeking closer ties with allies in the region to push back against China’s assertiveness there.
A few hundred people, mostly without protective face masks, demonstrated in central Belgrade on March 20 against the latest restrictive measures aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus. Placards reading “Stop COVID Terror” could be seen alongside banners displaying anti-migrant messages and opposing Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. Speakers introduced as environmental activists also spoke against a lithium mining project that is reportedly planned by the international metals firm Rio Tinto. The rally took place despite a ban against gatherings of more than five people.
Albania has started inoculating health workers from Kosovo. On March 20, about 200 Kosovar medics were bused to Kukes, an Albanian town close to the border with Kosovo, to get vaccinated against COVID-19. They received AstraZeneca vaccines that Albania had secured earlier this month. Kosovo is the only country in Europe that has not yet started to vaccinate its population. Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has said that his country is ready to provide broader coronavirus-related assistance to Kosovo and that it was important to begin with the vaccination of health-care workers. Kosovo expects to receive more than 100,000 of its own AstraZeneca doses through the UN-backed COVAX program for poorer countries.
Akram Neghabi has been searching for her son for more than two decades, despite threats, state pressure, and numerous futile attempts to get information from Iranian officials.
Neghabi’s son, computer science student Saeed Zeinali, was arrested at his home in the Iranian capital in July 1999, a few days after big student protests at Tehran University that were met with force.
Three armed agents said they were taking Zeinali, 22, in for questioning,
They said he would be back soon.
When my husband was detained, we were told not to look for Saeed anymore. They said you have to end this.”
Some three months later, Zeinali made a brief phone call to his family, telling them that he was in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison and urging them to follow up on his case with the authorities.
“I’m well,” he said.
That was the last time they heard from him.
Since then, Neghabi has been trying to find him and determine his fate, contacting the judiciary, prison officials, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the police, and even the office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
But no one has given her a clear answer.
“There is no organization that we have not contacted,” she said, adding that “they don’t even accept our letters anymore. They don’t want Saeed’s name to be heard.”
Despite all of her efforts, Zeinali’s whereabouts are unknown and the mother of three says she doesn’t even know if her son is dead or alive.
Akram Neghabi (left) with other grieving mothers whose children were either killed or are in prison after participating in anti-government protests
In 2016, a judiciary spokesman said that “no document” had been found proving that Zeinali was arrested, adding that he appeared to be “missing.”
“I’m a mother whose child was taken away 22 years ago. I want to know what happened to him. Is he alive? I have been left with nothing — not a sign or a grave — and I’m not sure what to do,” Neghabi said in an interview with RFE/RL’s Radio Farda.
One day, the pain of the mothers, the sound of their cries, will bring [change].”
She said in past years she even spent hours outside Evin prison and other detention centers with a photo of her son.
“I would go in front of prisons holding a [big] picture photo of my Saeed, [hoping] that maybe someone had seen him,” she said. “Maybe my Saeed is an old man now. I [used to] go outside prisons with this hope, but unfortunately [state] pressure and arrests [now] prevent me from doing so.”
Neghabi and her daughter were arrested in 2010 and held in prison for two months, where they were questioned and threatened. She has said that she was told by her IRGC interrogators that her son had been “martyred.”
Her husband, Hashem Zeinali, was detained in 2015 and sentenced to nearly three months in prison and 74 lashes for “disturbing public order” after he took part in a gathering outside Evin prison in support of the jailed leader of a spiritual group.
Neghabi said her husband got mixed up with those protesters while demanding answers about his son.
“When my husband was detained, we were told not to look for Saeed anymore. They said you have to end this,” Neghabi said, adding that such pressure has failed to stop her quest.
Neghabi said she will keep demanding justice and accountability along with other mothers whose sons have become victims of Iranian state violence in recent years, including in November 2019, when at least several hundred protesters were killed in the government’s brutal crackdown on antiestablishment protests started by a sharp rise in gasoline prices.
The mothers of the missing children have gotten together in recent years to offer each other support while also raising their voices against state repression.
“One day, the pain of the mothers, the sound of their cries, will bring [change],” said Neghabi, adding that her only hope is that other mothers don’t have to mourn a child as she has.
“I pray that no more young people are killed or arrested, [beaten, or] tortured,” she said. “I hope to see that day.”
Written by Golnaz Esfandiari based on an interview by Radio Farda’s Fereshteh Ghazi
The United States has called for “any entity involved” in the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project between Russia and Germany to disengage “immediately” or face U.S. sanctions.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged those entities to pull out of construction on the German-Russian gas project, saying on March 18 that President Joe Biden’s administration was “committed to complying” with the law passed in 2019 and extended in 2020 by the U.S. Congress that provides for sanctions.
“Nord Stream 2 is a bad deal — for Germany, for Ukraine, and for our Central and Eastern European allies and partners,” Blinken said in a statement, reiterating Washington’s long-standing opposition to the $11 billion gas pipeline running under the Baltic Sea.
U.S. officials argue that the pipeline, which is supposed to transport 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia to Germany once a year, will make Europe too dependent on Russian energy supplies.
Blinken denounced it as a “Russian geopolitical project intended to divide Europe and weaken European energy security.”
The State Department “is tracking efforts to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and is evaluating information regarding entities that appear to be involved,” he added.
So far, Washington has only imposed sanctions on the Russian company KVT-RUS, which operates the pipe-laying vessel Fortuna. These measures were announced by the administration of U.S. president Donald Trump shortly before the end of its term in January.
Supporters of the gas pipeline have long accused the US of undermining the project in order to increase sales of their liquid gas in Europe.
