Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya has called on the United States to apply more sanctions to pressure authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who has led a brutal crackdown against prodemocracy protests triggered by last year’s disputed presidential election.
Speaking virtually at a U.S. congressional hearing on May 6, Tsikhanouskaya also urged the United States to engage in international mediation jointly with European partners to help end the crisis in Belarus.
“We call on the U.S. to use its diplomacy to further isolate Lukashenka, to underscore his point of political no return has passed,” said Tsikhanouskaya, who lives in self-imposed exile in Lithuania.
Describing human rights abuses and “relentless political repression” in her country, she asked Congress to increase its support for civil society, independent media, and human right defenders in exile and in Belarus.
The opposition leader claims to have won last August’s presidential election and has sought to unite opposition forces in the face of a brutal regime crackdown on mass protests.
The United States and European Union have imposed sanctions on senior figures in Lukashenka’s government over what they say was a fraudulent election and ongoing human rights abuses.
In April, the United States said it would not renew a special license authorizing transactions with nine state-owned Belarusian companies.
Tsikhanouskaya called those sanctions “among the most effective measures,” but she called on Washington to punish other entities and regime figures in her country.
She also asked that the United States keep Belarus high on the international agenda and help organize an international conference.
KYIV — Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the United States is considering Ukraine’s request for “additional” military assistance to help deter Kremlin aggression following a massive buildup of Russian forces near their shared border.
Kyiv has requested U.S. air defense systems and anti-sniper technology, along with a possible deployment of Patriot missiles in Ukraine.
Blinken told RFE/RL on May 6 in an interview in the Ukrainian capital, where he met with the country’s top leaders, including President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, that the Pentagon is “looking at what additional assistance — beyond the very significant assistance that we’ve already provided, including equipment — would be helpful to Ukraine right now. That’s a very active consideration.”
The United States has provided nearly $5 billion in financial, humanitarian, and military aid — including lethal, anti-tank weapons — to Ukraine since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and backed separatists in two of its eastern provinces, sparking a war that has killed more than 13,000.
Blinken’s first trip to Kyiv since being tapped by President Joe Biden earlier this year to lead the State Department comes just weeks after Russia deployed more than 100,000 troops near the border with Ukraine in what the United States called an act of intimidation.
Russia has withdrawn some of the troops and equipment, but much still remains, posing a serious and immediate threat to Ukraine, Blinken said.
“Russia has the capacity on pretty short notice to take further aggressive action, so we’re being very vigilant about that…and also making sure that we’re helping Ukraine have the means to defend itself,” Blinken said in the RFE/RL interview.
Ukraine has called on the United States to threaten to exclude Russian banks from the SWIFT messaging system as a way to deter Kremlin aggression.
Some analysts say exclusion from SWIFT, which facilitates secure and fast communications between financial institutions, would be a significant blow to Russia’s economy.
Blinken said the United States “will consider every reasonable option” to deter Kremlin aggression against Ukraine, but declined to comment directly on the possibility of using SWIFT.
The top U.S. diplomat reiterated the Biden administration’s message that the United States is not seeking an escalation with Russia.
However, he said the United States does not accept the concept of “spheres of influence” and will respond to any Kremlin aggression that threatens Washington’s interests or those of its partners.
“If we allow those principles [of no spheres of influence] to be violated with impunity, then that is going to send a message, not just to Russia. It’s going to send a message in other parts of the world as well, that those rules don’t matter, that countries can behave any way they want,” he said.
Blinken said it was “a recipe for an international system that falls apart.”
Last month the United States and the European Union sought to send a global message about its stance on human rights and democracy when it announced coordinated sanctions against Russian officials over the incarceration on Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
Those sanctions came on the heels of punishments imposed on a series of Russian individuals and companies in connection with the Kremlin’s alleged poisoning of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny with a nerve agent and the hacking of U.S. government agencies.
Those alleged actions have increased the already severe strains in ties between Russia and the West, long seen by both as being close to, at, or below Cold War lows since the start of aggression against Ukraine in 2014.
Russia has continued to pressure Navalny and his supporters even after this imprisonment, seeking to shut down his network, which has published journalistic investigations into alleged corruption among the nation’s top officials.
To that end, in the May 6 interview, Blinken condemned Russia’s mounting pressure on independent media, including RFE/RL, saying it was a sign of Kremlin weakness.
“I think that countries that deny freedom of the press, are countries that don’t have a lot of confidence in themselves or in their systems. What is there to be afraid of in informing the people, and in holding leaders accountable,” he said.
Hasan Akbarov, a 31-year-old Tajik border guard, was shot dead the day before he was set to celebrate his sister’s wedding. In Kyrgyzstan, border officer Isfana Bekzod Yuldashev died in the same conflict days before his 31st birthday. Their families are among those whose lives were shattered by two days of violence.
Russian researchers say more than 150 endangered seals have been discovered washed up dead on the shores of the Caspian Sea over the course of several days.
Viktor Nikiforov of the Moscow Marine Mammals research center said on May 6 that the Caspian seals have been found on the shores of the sea in the region of Daghestan.
The exact cause of the deaths is still unknown.
They may have been caused by “industrial pollution, fishing, or poaching when seals get caught in the nets,” Nikiforov said, adding: “Maybe this is the consequence of climate change or several causes at the same time.”
Alimurad Hajiyev, the director of the Institute of Ecology and Sustainable Development of the Daghestan State University, said that many of the marine mammals were found entangled in fishing nets.
The researchers said the seals were discovered some 100 kilometers south of the regional capital, Makhachkala, and 50 kilometers north of the city.
Makhachkala, Daghestan
The Federal Fisheries Agency in the North Caucasus said it had dispatched inspectors to carry out a count.
The Investigative Committee said it was also looking into the matter.
The Caspian seal is the only mammal living in the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water.
The endemic species has for decades suffered from overhunting and industrial pollution in the sea, and their number is now estimated at less than 70,000, down from more than 1 million in the early 20th century.
In December 2020, Russian authorities reported the death of more than 300 seals on Dagestan’s Caspian shore.
Listed as a threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) since 2008, the seal was included in Russia’s Red Data Book of endangered and rare species this year.
The Caspian Sea, shared by five riparian states — Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Turkmenistan — boasts vast oil and gas reserves.
Pollution from hydrocarbon extraction and declining water levels are posing a threat to many local species and putting the future of the sea itself at risk.
It was one of the most sophisticated digital fraud operations in the history of the Internet, by some accounts scamming between $10 million and $30 million over the roughly four years it existed.
Dubbed “Methbot” by security researchers, the operation used thousands of infected computers around the world to falsely inflate web traffic to dummy websites and defraud advertisers. A related, overlapping scam, dubbed “3ev,” used infected residential computers linked to real human users.
This week in a U.S. federal court in New York City, the Russian man accused by U.S. authorities of being a ringleader of the group, Aleksandr Zhukov, went on trial for wire fraud, money laundering, and other charges.
One cybercrime researcher described the setup used to run the Methbot network as “the most costly botnet fraud in history.”
Extradited to the United States after being arrested in Bulgaria in November 2018, Zhukov has pleaded innocent. Seven other people, mainly Russians, have also been indicted.
“The cybercrime in my indictment is just [the] imagination of [the] FBI, and I wish to go to jury,” Zhukov told the U.S. court in April 2019.
The case is the latest example of U.S. law enforcement going after alleged Russian cybercriminals around the world, a trend that has infuriated the Kremlin, which has accused the United States of hunting Russian citizens.
But written into the code of the Methbot case, there’s also technical intrigue: The network of servers that was allegedly used by the hackers has been under scrutiny to determine whether it was used by Russian state-backed hackers, or intelligence agencies, to hack into U.S. political parties
“Differentiating between what is ‘cybercrime’ and what is nation-state activity, such as espionage, is getting increasingly difficult, especially concerning Russia,” Mathew Schwartz, executive editor of the industry journal DataBreachToday, told RFE/RL. “In part, this is because some individuals who have day jobs as government hackers — or contractors — seem to hack the West in their spare time — for fun, patriotism or profit.”
‘Are You Gangsters? No, We Are Russians’
According to U.S. court records, the Methbot scam first took form in September 2014, when Zhukov and five other men from Russia and Kazakhstan allegedly rented more than 1,900 computer servers at commercial data centers in Texas and elsewhere and used them to simulate humans viewing ads on fabricated webpages.
Eventually, the scam grew to include more than 850,000 Internet addresses, supported by hundreds of dedicated servers located in the United States and in Europe, mainly in the Netherlands.
In a September 2014 text message obtained by U.S. investigators and published by prosecutors, Zhukov, who had moved to Bulgaria in 2010, allegedly bragged about the scope of the scheme to another man who was part of the effort: “You bet! King of fraud!”
“Are you gangsters? No, we are Russians,” the other man responds, according to a U.S. transcript.
In December 2016, White Ops, a U.S. cybersecurity company that specializes in digital ad fraud and botnets, published a report that pinpointed much of the technical information about the operation and its financial damages. Those findings were later corroborated by researchers at Google.
Differentiating between what is ‘cybercrime’ and what is nation-state activity, such as espionage, is getting increasingly difficult, especially concerning Russia.”
Methbot, White Ops concluded, “was the largest and most profitable advertising fraud operation to strike digital advertising to date.”
On November 6, 2018, Bulgarian police raided the apartment in the Black Sea port of Varna where Zhukov was living and, with U.S. law enforcement present, questioned, then arrested, Zhukov, seizing his computer hardware and cell phones. U.S. authorities unsealed a 13-count indictment against him and seven other Russian and Kazakh nationals later that month.
Zhukov was extradited to the United States two months later, in January 2019.
Another key player was a Kazakh man named Sergei Ovysannikov, who allegedly was involved in the overlapping botnet scheme called 3ve. The scheme was tied to at least $29 million in fraud and allegedly involved more than 1.7 million infected computers. Because the infected computers were in homes, they were linked to real human beings, making it harder to detect.
“However you want to look at it, from an illicit profit-generating perspective, that counts as super lucrative,” Schwartz said.
Ovysannikov was arrested on a U.S. warrant in Malaysia in October 2018. He later pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court.
Yevgeny Timchenko, another Kazakh national who was also allegedly linked to the 3ve scheme, was arrested in Estonia the same month as Zhukov and later extradited. The other men named in the indictment are still at large, according to U.S. officials.
The Steele Dossier
Though the fraud allegedly committed in the Methbot and 3ve schemes was lucrative, the underlying technologies and infrastructure used have interested security researchers and experts tracking state-sponsored hacking efforts, particularly those involving Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, and other countries with developed hacking capabilities.
The complicated setup used to run the Methbot network was extensive and expensive, according to one cybercrime researcher, who described it as “the most costly botnet fraud in history.”
A sizable number of the servers that the Methbot operation rented and utilized were owned and maintained by companies affiliated with XBT Holding S.A., which is owned by a Russian venture capitalist named Aleksei Gubarev.
Russian tech entrepreneur Aleksei Gubarev arrives at the High Court in London in July 2020.
That holding includes a group of web-hosting businesses also known as Webzilla, which has operations in Dallas, Texas, as well as in Russia, and which has specialized in services aimed at Internet advertisers, gaming companies, software developers, and e-commerce businesses. Among its web-hosting domains are DDoS.com, 1-800-HOSTING, and SecureVPN.com.
A series of reports by the McClatchy newspaper network and the Miami Herald documented how major web viruses have spread via XBT’s infrastructure.
While known within the tech industry, Gubarev’s name and his companies burst into wider public view in January 2017 with the publication of a collection of memos written by a former British spy named Christopher Steele.
The memos, which were written in 2016, included salacious, unverified allegations against then-U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump. It later emerged that the work was commissioned by a Washington law firm on behalf of the Democratic Party.
The collected memos, which had circulated among reporters in Washington but were published first by BuzzFeed, were known as the Steele Dossier.
One memo alleged that XBT/Webzilla and affiliated companies played a key role in the hack of Democratic Party computers in the spring of 2016, which resulted in the leak of e-mails that many believe helped harm former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Trump. The memo also alleged Gubarev had been coerced into providing services to Russia’s main domestic security agency, known as the FSB.
Subsequent U.S. intelligence reports and law enforcement indictments blamed the hack on Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU. Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, called the SVR, has been implicated both in that hack and the more recent SolarWinds intrusion of U.S. government and corporate servers.
Gubarev has denied the allegations and sued BuzzFeed in U.S. court for publishing the Steele Dossier. That lawsuit was ultimately thrown out, but during the process, a technical expert who had served as chief of staff of the FBI’s Cyber Division in Washington, D.C., testified on behalf of BuzzFeed’s lawyers.
The expert, Anthony Ferrante, said that Russian cyberespionage groups had used XBT servers to conduct “spear-phishing” campaigns against Democratic politicians, and XBT-owned infrastructure had been used to support Russian state-sponsored cybercampaigns.
Ferrante asserted that the size of the Methbot operation, and the fact that a large number of IP addresses were first added to XBT-affiliated servers in late 2015 and then suddenly shut off in December 2016, meant an XBT employee would have had to do that manually.
That, he said, pointed to the likelihood that XBT managers knew the company’s infrastructure was being used for illegal activity.
“Additionally, the operation was a large scale ‘botnet,’ which is consistent with statements made in the [Steele] Dossier,” Ferrante wrote.
‘Unsung Heroes’
A press spokesman for Ferrante’s Boston-based consulting company declined to comment further on the case.
Gubarev, who reportedly lives in Cyprus, could not be immediately located for comment.
In an e-mail to RFE/RL, however, his U.S. lawyer confirmed that XBT had hosted some of the Methbot operation. But, he said, Gubarev and XBT executives were in fact “unsung heroes” because, he said, they canceled the account and preserved hard drives as evidence.
“The reason that the government is able to make its case now is because of the fast action by Mr. Gubarev and Webzilla,” Val Gurvits, a lawyer based in the Boston suburb of Newton, told RFE/RL.
Gurvits also said that while “bad actors” misused Webzilla’s network, “not a single reputable source found that Webzilla was at fault for any such misuse.”
“The truth is that my clients have always taken extraordinary measures to ensure that its networks are not misused,” he said.
Schwartz, of DataBreachToday, said the Methbot case shows how blurred the line has become between run-of-the-mill online criminal activity and state-sponsored cybercampaigns of the sort used not only by Russian intelligence, but also the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. National Security Agency, and intelligence agencies around the world.
He also said agencies are increasingly using commonly available malware, and even criminal-run infrastructure, as part of “the cybercrime-as-service ecosystem.”
“For spies, using infrastructure built by — and for — criminals makes sense, because it’s more difficult for victims or foreign intelligence agencies to tell if any given activity is criminal or government run,” he said.
Lawyers of the Team 29 (Komanda 29) judicial group have appealed a decision to restrict the activities of jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK)
The Team 29 said in a statement that its lawyers Maksim Olenichev and Valeria Vetoshkina filed the appeal with the Moscow First Court of Appeals on May 6.
The Moscow City Court ruled on April 27 that the activities of the FBK and another group associated with Navalny, the Citizens’ Rights Defense Foundation (FZPG), must be temporarily banned from using media, placing materials on the Internet, taking part in elections and referendums, and carrying out some banking operations.
A day earlier, the Moscow prosecutor halted all activities of Navalny’s regional offices and petitioned the court to do the same for the FBK and FZPG as the prosecutors didn’t have the authority to do so on their own.
The move is part of a broader initiative by the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office, which seeks to have the Moscow City Court label the FBK, the FZPG, and Navalny’s regional headquarters, as “extremist.”
That proposal has been condemned by international and domestic human rights groups who say that if the Navalny organizations are labeled as “extremist,” their employees and those passing on information about them could face arrest and lengthy prison terms.
Vetoshkina said in the May 6 statement that some of the restrictions could not be imposed by a court.
“For instance, within current laws, the ban to hold public events is irrelevant for a foundation since it cannot organize them by law. Therefore, the court went beyond the current legislation, which indicates that its goal is to create maximum obstacles for the organization’s activities. It is obvious that the FBK’s operations do not impose any danger to the rights, freedoms and lawful interests of a wide number of people because they fully correspond to legal requirements,” Vetoshkina said.
The leader of Team 29, noted that Russian lawyer Ivan Pavlov was briefly detained in Moscow on April 30 and accused of disclosing classified information about the ongoing investigation of one of his clients, former journalist Ivan Safronov.
A Moscow court then barred Pavlov from using the Internet, mobile telephones, and communicating with witnesses in Safronov’s case, which caused a public outcry across Russia.
On May 3, Pavlov issued a statement, saying he and his team will continue to defend all their clients, including Navalny’s groups, despite the restrictions imposed on him.
The European Union has approved the participation of NATO members the United States, Canada, and Norway in a project aimed at speeding up the movement of troops and military equipment around Europe.
The May 6 decision marks the first time the EU has opened up an initiative from its Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) pact, which aims to deepen defense ties, to outside partners.
The pact was agreed by EU leaders in December 2017 amid heightened tensions between the West and Moscow over Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.
Moscow annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in March 2014 and has been backing separatists in eastern Ukraine in a war that has killed more than 13,000 people since April 2014.
The bloc has since earmarked 1.7 billion euros ($2 billion) from its joint budget until 2028 to improve so-called military mobility, something NATO deems as crucial in the event of a conflict with Russia.
Beyond border red tape, the smooth deployment of forces whether by land, sea, or air is also often hindered by ill-adapted infrastructure.
At their first in-person meeting in more than a year in Brussels, the 27 EU defense ministers gave the greenlight for the United States, Canada, and Norway to join the bloc’s military mobility project, led by the Netherlands.
The three countries’ “expertise will contribute to the project and, with it, to improving military mobility within and beyond the EU,” the bloc’s foreign policy chief and meeting chairman, Josep Borrell, said in a statement.
“It will make EU defense more efficient and contribute to strengthen our security.”
German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer hailed the move as a “quantum leap in concrete cooperation when it comes to ensuring that troops can be deployed in Europe across national borders.”
“Talking about military mobility, making sure that troops can be moved across borders within Europe is a very important issue not only for the European Union but also for NATO,” she added.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who met with the EU ministers, also welcomed the move, and noted that “non-EU allies play an essential role in protecting and defending Europe.”
The United States and its NATO allies have enhanced their presence in the eastern part of the alliance, in part to help reassure Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland that they will be defended in case of any Russian aggression.
Canada is leading a NATO battlegroup stationed in Latvia, and non-EU member Norway is involved, too.
At their meeting in Brussels, EU defense ministers are also expected to discuss the situation in and around Ukraine.
MINSK — Dzyanis Urbanovich, a Belarusian opposition leader and no stranger to longtime leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s security apparatus and jails, was snatched off the streets of Minsk on April 21 and locked up in a prison that has become synonymous with torture.
Urbanovich, leader of the outlawed Malady Front (Youth Front) movement, was sentenced the next day in a trial that he says lasted all of three minutes and thrown back into a overcrowded two-person cell at the notorious Akrestsina detention center.
Dzyanis Urbanovich
Versed in the harsh conditions at Akrestsina, Urbanovich was nonetheless shocked by a new tactic the guards employed.
“It was hot in there, and they poured in a bucket of bleach,” Urbanovich recently recounted to Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. “The air became thick with the fumes and you couldn’t breathe. Your eyes started to tear up and your throat burned. You became wobbly, swaying here and there…. You needed to rinse your mouth with water and spit it out.”
The recent use of bleach at Akrestsina has been confirmed publicly by at least one other Belarusian jailed there and highlights what observers say are Lukashenka’s increasingly aggressive measures aimed at eliminating the remaining opposition to his rule.
Displaying the opposition’s colors of red and white — be it on banners or even socks — can result in arrest, detention, or a fine.
Lukashenka, a 66-year-old former Soviet collective farm manager who has ruled Belarus since 1994, has pushed changes through in his rubber-stamp parliament that further criminalize criticizing the government or taking part in unsanctioned demonstrations. Other pending changes would make it a crime for reporters to cover unsanctioned protests or stream them online.
Lukashenka has chosen a “deterrence strategy,” unleashing a new wave of repression to prevent any fresh wave of mass protests, one analyst says.
Belarus has been rocked by protests since Lukashenka, in power since 1994, was declared the landslide winner of an August 9 election amid claims the vote was rigged against Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a political novice and arguably the biggest threat to Lukashenka’s decades-long rule. More than 30,000 have been detained and thousands beaten or even tortured in the government’s brutal crackdown.
The Belarusian NGO Vyasna says there are now 369 political prisoners in Belarus. Many opposition leaders are either in prison or have fled Belarus. Hundreds of journalists have been targeted as well, many simply for reporting on the protests.
Hard Authoritarian Or Soft Totalitarian?
To demonize the protest movement, Lukashenka has also recently pushed unfounded claims that the opposition — allegedly backed by Washington — was plotting to murder his family and depose him, prompting one of his top Interior Ministry officers to describe regime opponents as “wild dogs.”
While public discontent remains high, the price of protesting the Lukashenka regime has become increasingly high, with people either out of work, out of the country, or too scared to risk harsher penalties by taking to the streets, explained Kamil Klysinski, a senior fellow at the Warsaw-based OSW Center for Eastern Studies.
“In the past few months, the regime has evolved from what I’d call medium authoritarian to hard authoritarian or even soft totalitarian,” Klysinski told RFE/RL in e-mailed remarks. “His opponents are punished for everything, even for flags or clothes with the illegal white-red-white symbol. It’s an unprecedented situation, and that’s why there is no activity on the streets.”
Protests that once attracted as many as 200,000 people in Minsk in the wake of the disputed election are long a thing of the past. In recent months, flash mobs and other subtler forms of protest have become the norm.
Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya leads the Belarusian opposition from Lithuania.
Tsikhanouskaya, who left for Lithuania after the vote, conceded in February that the pro-democracy movement had “lost the streets.” She had hoped to reignite it on March 25, or Freedom Day, when Belarus marked the anniversary of the founding of the first, albeit short-lived, democratic Belarus republic in 1918.
Ahead of the planned nationwide rallies at that time, Ivan Tertel, the head of the KGB state security agency, claimed to have uncovered plans to “destabilize” Belarus. State-run television showed Interior Ministry troops preparing for “mass unrest,” and a top Interior Ministry official talked of dealing harshly with protesters, whom he had described as “enemies of the state.”
Given the threats and ongoing arrests, the large crowds never materialized. Nevertheless, more than 200 people were arrested that day at modest marches across the country, according to Vyasna.
Lukashenka “chose a deterrence strategy,” unleashing a new wave of repression to nip in the bud any fresh wave of mass protests, explained Alesia Rudnik, a Belarusian analyst based in Sweden.
“Dozens of journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens were arrested,” Rudnik explained in e-mailed comments. “The regime introduced draconian laws on extremism and mass events. Right in this period, state TV started to actively produce more advanced propaganda materials with new narratives and stories. All this indicates Lukashenka is attempting to strengthen his power.”
Changes to the country’s mass-media law — passed by the rubber-stamp parliament in April — would make it illegal for journalists to “discredit” the state, or livestream mass unauthorized gatherings, among other draconian measures. Average Belarusians face stiffer penalties for criticizing the government or taking part in unsanctioned rallies, according to changes to the country’s Criminal Code. The proposed changes have been denounced by rights activists, including Human Rights Watch.
‘They Started Coughing, Retching…’
Urbanovich said conditions at Akrestsina — one of the most notorious detention centers in Belarus — worsened around the time of the planned mass demonstrations coinciding with Freedom Day.
“Up until Freedom Day, things were more or less the same,” he said. “There were mattresses, books, board games. And then on the 27th, it all changed. First, they took out the mattresses, and then gradually by April 1, there was nothing left. And after April 1, they began to deal with us physically.”
Mikalay Kazlou, a member of the Coordination Council of the Belarusian Opposition (KRBA) and leader of the opposition United Civil Party (AHP), was also jailed for 15 days at Akrestsina around the same time, having been snatched off the streets of Minsk on March 22. He also described being subjected to bleach or chlorine.
“They poured in two buckets of highly concentrated chlorine,” Kazlou told Current Time. “So high, that after about half a minute everyone’s eyes began to tear, their noses began to run, they started coughing, retching. Some turned blue because the concentration was too high.”
Officials of the Lukashenka government denied the bleach claims.
Illegal Socks?
Meanwhile, reports appear on a near-daily basis of Belarusians being detained or fined for merely displaying anything with the colors red and white, which are associated with the opposition and the first republic flag.
Natalia Sivtsova-Syadushkina had the red-and-white banners hanging from her Minsk apartment balcony ripped down by Belarusian security officers on March 24. She was charged with “illegal picketing” and fined 2,030 rubles ($794).
The next day, Freedom Day, she was stopped on the street and fined 2,320 rubles ($900) for wearing “socks of the wrong color” — red and white.
“Now I owe 4,350 rubles,” Svitsova-Syadushkina told RFE/RL. “I don’t have that kind of money to pay the fines, even though I work.”
According to Vyasna, more than 300 people were detained in April and at least 98 people were sentenced the same month on what it described as politically motivated charges, notably for the use of red-white symbols.
Coup Plot?
On April 17, Lukashenka made bizarre claims that an assassination attempt was being prepared against him and his two sons, as well as a military coup, to be carried out by a “group of foreign security services, probably the CIA and the FBI” and approved “by the top political leadership” in the United States. Washington quickly denied what it called the “absurd” claims.
The same day, Russian security services reported they had detained two people in Moscow for allegedly planning a military coup in Belarus. Yuras Zyankovich, a Belarusian-born lawyer who also holds U.S. citizenship, and Alyaksandr Fyaduta, who served as Lukashenka’s spokesman in the 1990s, were extradited to Belarus.
The claims came days before Lukashenka traveled to Moscow for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Lukashenka has leaned on amid growing international isolation for his regime’s crackdown.
A protest against the actions of Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka in Kyiv (file photo)
Moscow probably had a hand in the concocted plot, argued Klysinski, allowing Russian President Vladimir Putin — who was facing growing international criticism at that time over a troop buildup around Ukraine, as well as over the treatment of imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny — to cast himself as a bulwark against the perfidious West.
“Moscow exploits this plot because it needs to fuel anti-Western — mainly anti-American — propaganda and they are doing this quite intensively. At the same time, the Kremlin can show itself in the role of defenders of [the] post-Soviet area, of [the] independence of smaller and weaker republics,” Klysinski said.
[Lukashenka] simply keeps going back to the same familiar bag of tricks, especially when he feels he is getting the upper hand.”
Putin reaffirmed Lukashenka’s claims during an address to parliament on April 21 and accused the West of pretending that “nothing is happening.”
For Lukashenka, accusing foreign forces — even Russia, as before the disputed presidential election — of plotting his downfall is nothing new, explained Kenneth Yalowith, a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington who served as U.S. ambassador to Belarus in the 1990s.
“When I was there, he accused me on national TV of leading a NATO ambassadors plot against him. He simply keeps going back to the same familiar bag of tricks, especially when he feels he is getting the upper hand,” Yalowitz told RFE/RL in e-mailed comments.
Like the supposedly foreign-inspired unrest that Belarus warned about before the opposition’s Freedom Day marches, the latest coup plot was ostensibly timed for the May 9 celebrations of the end of World War II in Europe, another time when the opposition has been calling on backers to take to the streets again.
After Belarusian state broadcaster ONT on April 25 aired a program on the alleged conspirators, Mikalay Karpyankou, a deputy interior minister in charge of the ministry’s troops, said the regime opponents were “mad dogs.”
According to Karpyankou — no stranger to brutal threats and actions — opponents of the government have “crossed a line” with their “plans and actions,” putting them in league with “international terrorists.”
“This means that the fight against them will be fought as the Israeli forces fight their terrorists. The fight against them will be carried out in the same way as the ‘most humane’ state fought against Osama bin Laden and his followers,” Karyankou said, referring apparently to the United States,in comments reported on April 29.
Lukashenka, for now at least, may have won the battle on the streets, but Rudnik notes he may be running out of time, albeit perhaps slowly.
“Economic crisis, pressure from the democratic world, less support from the former electorate, and a lot more — these are the factors of instability for Lukashenka today,” Rudnik said. “Forecasting whether he finds means to overcome these pressures, economic crises, and lack of trust is difficult. But I would lean toward two or three years more with Lukashenka, quite a short term in a 27-year perspective.”
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Tony Wesolowsky with reporting by Current Time and RFE/RL’s Belarus Service.
ASHGABAT — World War II veterans in the isolated Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan have been ordered to pay for the gifts they are scheduled to receive on behalf of the authoritarian President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov at a Victory Day commemoration marked annually on May 9 in a majority of former Soviet republics.
RFE/RL correspondents report from the eastern region of Lebap that local authorities ordered the war veterans and the veterans of labor during the war to collect money for their own gifts.
Last year, authorities in the tightly controlled former Soviet republic ordered the veterans to pay for gifts from the president and medals they received for the 75th anniversary of victory in World War II.
Several people told RFE/RL on condition of anonymity that the amounts requested by the authorities were much higher than the price of the gifts the veterans received from the president last year.
The amount of money and the prices of the gifts for this year remain unclear.
Before 2020, the government gave the veterans 200 manats ($55 at the current official exchange rate and $5.5 at the black market rate) each year on Victory Day as a mark of appreciation for their WWII service.
Authorities in neighboring Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan said earlier that war veterans and veterans of labor during the war will receive equivalents of $950 and $2,350 respectively on May 9.
Russian authorities announced this week that war veterans will receive 10,000 rubles ($135) each on Victory Day this year.
Turkmenistan has been caught up in an economic crisis in recent years despite being home to the world’s fourth-largest proven natural gas resources.
The coronavirus pandemic has worsened the situation, though the Turkmen government has denied both the economic crisis and the presence of COVID-19 in the country despite substantial evidence otherwise.
According to Human Rights Watch, Berdymukhammedov, “his relatives and their associates control all aspects of public life, and the authorities encroach on private life.”
Turkmen regional authorities recently issued an order saying that lines at state stores could be no longer than four people long after the president’s son publicly said that “crowds near stores discredit” his father.
A Russian journalist labeled as a “foreign agent” has turned the tables on several local lawmakers in the northwestern region of Pskov, sending them money to make them associates.
Denis Kamalyagin, the chief editor of the Pskovskaya gubernia newspaper who was labeled by a court as a “foreign agent” in December, said on May 5 he transferred unspecified amounts of money via his mobile phone to the region’s governor, the mayor of the regional capital, Pskov, and a lawmaker representing the region in the Russian parliament’s lower chamber, the State Duma.
Kamalyagin told Dozhd TV and the media outlet Meduza that he transferred the money in January and informed the Justice Ministry about it in a report that he must provide regularly as “a foreign agent.”
He said his goal was to prove that the law on “foreign agents” must be reconsidered.
“It is clear that according to current law, anyone who has a personal website and receives money from abroad can be designated a ‘foreign agent,’” Kamalyagin said, pointing out that the law had been applied selectively so far.
“In theory this means that during the election [campaign in September], these comrades would have to allocate 15 percent of their [campaign] billboards to show that they are associated with foreign agents,” Kamalyagin said.
Only after he publicly announced the stunt did the three officials transfer the money back.
Russia’s so-called “foreign agent” legislation was adopted in 2012 and has been modified repeatedly.
It requires nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign assistance and that the government deems to be engaged in political activity to be registered, to identify themselves as “foreign agents,” and to submit to audits. Later modifications targeted foreign-funded media.
In 2017, the Russian government placed RFE/RL’s Russian Service on the list, along with six other RFE/RL Russian-language news services, and Current Time, a network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
At the end of 2020, the legislation was modified to allow the Russian government to include individuals, including foreign journalists, on its “foreign agents” list and to impose restrictions on them.
The Russian state media monitor Roskomnadzor last year adopted rules requiring listed media to mark all written materials with a lengthy notice in large text, all radio materials with an audio statement, and all video materials with a 15-second text declaration.
The agency has submitted hundreds of complaints against RFE/RL’s projects to the courts, with the total fines levied at around $1 million. RFE/RL has appealed the moves.
RFE/RL has called the fines “a state-sponsored campaign of coercion and intimidation,” while the U.S. State Department has described them as “intolerable.”
Human Rights Watch has described the foreign agent legislation as “restrictive” and intended “to demonize independent groups.”
DUSHANBE — Tajik authorities say 19 people were killed and 87 injured in clashes along a disputed segment of the border with Kyrgyzstan last week, in their first official data on the violence.
The official statement by the authorities of the northern Sughd region on May 6 said that all of the victims were from villages close to the border. It did not provide any more details.
RFE/RL correspondents from the area have reported that 20 people, including 11 military personnel, were killed during the violence.
Tajikistan’s official statement comes after the deadly violence erupted on April 28 and lasted for almost three days after the Tajiks tried to install security cameras on disputed territory near the border of the two Central Asian states.
Kyrgyz authorities have said that 36 Kyrgyz citizens died in the skirmishes, while 189 people were injured and 58,000 were evacuated.
Like many other border areas in Central Asia, almost half of the 970-kilometer-long Kyrgyz-Tajik border has not been demarcated, leading to tensions over the past 30 years. The latest fighting was the heaviest in years and raised fears of a wider conflict between the two impoverished neighbors.
Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov on May 6 visited villages in the southwestern Batken Province that were heavily affected by the clashes.
In the wake of the violence, Japarov discussed the situation with Tajik President Emomali Rahmon, who invited the Kyrgyz leader to the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, to discuss border issues.
After the phone call, it was officially announced that Japarov will visit Tajikistan in late May.
However, during a meeting with residents of the village of Margun, Japarov said he will not visit Tajikistan “until Kyrgyz-Tajik border issues are resolved.”
The European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and Russia have all urged both sides to respect the cease-fire agreement.
Both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan host Russian military bases.
Prosecutors from both countries have launched criminal cases over the deadly violence, accusing each other of deliberately “encroaching” into each other’s territory.
NUR-SULTAN — The fact that it hasn’t completed its clinical trials hasn’t stopped thousands of Kazakh citizens from getting their first shot of the domestically developed coronavirus vaccine QazVac.
The two-dose vaccine is still in its third stage of studies, which are expected to be completed in July. But QazVac’s developers — the state-backed Research Institute for Biological Safety Problems — insists the vaccine is safe and effective.
The institute claims QazVac has shown a 96 percent efficacy against the virus during second-phase testing.
No serious side effects have been reported among the vaccine recipients since the QazVac rollout began on April 26. The Health Ministry says 50,000 doses of QazVac have been distributed across the Central Asian country of nearly 19 million people.
I’d support vaccination with QazVac once I see enough published data [that backs the developers’ claims].”
But some independent experts have expressed skepticism due to what they describe as insufficient testing information, as well as the relatively small number of participants in QazVac testing thus far.
By the QazVac developers’ own admission, some 3,000 people took part in the trials that began in September. For comparison, the study for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine involved more than 43,000 participants.
Lesbek Kutymbetov, a QazVac developer, said the team is “fully confident that the vaccine is harmless.” He added that the research institute has been involved in vaccine production for decades.
QazVac was developed using the traditional method of taking a dead virus to spur an immune response from the body, Kutymbetov explained. After testing the vaccine on animals, Kutymbetov was the first person to get a QazVac jab in its early trials.
According to the QazVac manufacturer, it doesn’t need to be stored in freezers like the prominently used Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. QazVac can be kept in regular refrigerators.
Like the other coronavirus vaccines, it’s not yet clear how long QazVac will give immunity from the coronavirus to someone. Early research showed “antibodies lasted about half-a-year and then their numbers decreased in the seventh month,” Kutymbetov said.
‘No Time To Write Articles’
QazVaq developers haven’t published much information about their research on the vaccine, with Kutymbetov saying that they “don’t have time…to write articles.”
Asel Musabekova, a French-based expert on cellular and molecular biology, said a lack of information makes it impossible to assess the vaccine’s safety and efficacy.
“They could at least publish the results of the first and second phases of the clinical trials,” she said. “I’d support vaccination with QazVac once I see enough published data [that backs the developers’ claims].”
Asel Musabekova, a French-based expert on cellular and molecular biology, wants to see more published data about the QazVac vaccine.
Musabekova also said QazVac developers should have recruited a much larger pool of participants during the trials.
“Rare side effects can only be seen in large-scale clinical trials involving tens of thousands of people,” the Kazakh-born expert explained.
Limited Choice
The lack of information, however, hasn’t dampened the mood among many Kazakhs who stood in line to get injections across the country.
Aigul Nurlybekova, a 27-year-old resident of the capital, Nur-Sultan, received her first QazVac shot on April 28. The second dose should be taken three weeks later.
“I contracted coronavirus last summer. Six months later, when I heard about QazVac, I decided to get inoculated with it,” Nurlybekova said, adding that she trusts the domestically made vaccine.
People wait their turn before entering a vaccination center located at a shopping mall in Almaty. More than 1 million people in Kazakhstan — about 5.7 percent of the population — have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
Five days since getting the injection, Nurlybekova said she hasn’t experienced any major side effects.
Almaty resident Ardak Bukeeva did her homework before opting for QazVac over the Russian-made Sputnik V, a second vaccine option that is offered in Kazakhstan.
A journalist by profession, Bukeeva visited the research institute in February and spoke with the QazVac team to inquire about the vaccine they were developing.
Bukeeva told RFE/RL that at the end it was the institute’s “years of expertise” as well as the tried-and-tested vaccine ingredient — “the fully neutralized virus” — that convinced her to choose QazVac for herself and her family. She received her first dose on April 27.
“I hope it will be effective against the various coronavirus strains that we hear about every day, in India and elsewhere,” Bukeeva said.
Both women say many of their friends and acquaintances who have received QazVac injections haven’t had any serious side effects and are content with the vaccine.
But some Kazakhs took to social media to share their reservations about the sparse information on QazVac.
“Where are the research results? Where is the evaluation by foreign scientists? Not much is known about the components of the vaccine — there is almost no data,” Nur-Sultan resident Viktoria Murzintseva wrote on Facebook.
“I can’t even find decent domestically produced underwear anywhere, [let alone a coronavirus vaccine],” wrote a more skeptical Nur-Sultan resident, Aigul Fort.
So far, more than 1 million people in the Central Asian country — about 5.7 percent of the population — have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, mostly Sputnik V.
The resource-rich nation has also placed an order with Beijing for a million doses of the Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccine.
Some Kazakhs say they’re patiently waiting until more is known about the coronavirus vaccines in general before deciding whether to get one or not.
“I will wait. I’m in no hurry,” wrote Kazakh social-media user Zhanargul Omarova. “I will continue to wear a mask, wash my hands. I’m not going to weddings or parties and I have no plans to travel abroad anytime soon.”
There has been an official total of some 332,000 cases of the coronavirus in Kazakhstan, with 3,796 deaths as of May 5. Many observers and media outlets say those figures are grossly underreported due to government officials trying to hide the actual numbers.
Written by Farangis Najibullah in Prague based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service
A court in the western Russian city of Pskov has denied an appeal by RFE/RL contributor Lyudmila Savitskaya contesting her inclusion on Russia’s controversial register of “foreign agent” media.
The Pskov court ruled on May 5 that Savitskaya’s inclusion on the Justice Ministry’s list was lawful. Savitskaya’s attorneys said they would appeal the ruling.
Savitskaya and four other people — RFE/RL contributor Sergei Markelov, human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov, artist and activist Darya Apakhonchich, and Pskov newspaper editor Denis Kamalygin — were included in the “foreign agent” media list in December 2020.
The ministry did not give any justification for why these individuals were listed. All five are appealing their inclusion on the list.
In court on May 5, Justice Ministry representatives presented as evidence against Savitskaya articles she had written about anti-government protesters, alleged torture in Russian prisons, and the blocking of electronic communications in the areas around prisons.
In addition, they presented a large number of documents marked “for official use only” from the Interior Ministry, the Prosecutor-General’s Office, and other agencies that Savitskaya and her attorneys were not allowed to examine.
Savitskaya’s defense argued that none of the materials presented indicated that she was working at the behest of any foreign power.
In her closing remarks to the court, Savitskaya argued that she was merely doing her job as a professional journalist.
“These days, not a single state mass-media outlet is reporting about the real problems confronting people, But Radio Svoboda does,” she said, referring to the Russian Service of RFE/RL.
“I was labeled a ‘foreign agent’ because I am shouting out to everyone about injustice and about people who are being persecuted. But everyone needs to know that the real foreign agents today are sitting in the Kremlin and in the State Duma, because they are working against Russian citizens and against a happy Russia in the future, while I am working for them,” she added.
Russia’s so-called “foreign agent” legislation was adopted in 2012 and has been modified repeatedly. It requires nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign assistance and that the government deems to be engaged in political activity to be registered, to identify themselves as “foreign agents,” and to submit to audits.
Later modifications of the law targeted foreign-funded media. At the end of 2020, the legislation was modified to allow the Russian government to include individuals, including foreign journalists, on its “foreign agents” list and to impose restrictions on them.
In 2017, the Russian government placed RFE/RL’s Russian Service, six other RFE/RL Russian-language news services, and Current Time on the list.
Earlier this year, Russian courts began imposing large fines against RFE/RL for failing to mark its articles with a government-prescribed label as required by rules adopted in October 2020. RFE/RL is appealing the fines.
RFE/RL has called the fines “a state-sponsored campaign of coercion and intimidation,” while the U.S. State Department has described them as “intolerable.”
Human Rights Watch has described the foreign agent legislation as “restrictive” and intended “to demonize independent groups.”
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on Russian lawmakers to withdraw three bills under discussion, saying they “would add new dangerous tools” to an already “significant arsenal of legislative weapons” being used in the country’s crackdown on dissent.
HRW said in a statement on May 5 that two of the bills proposed by a group of lawmakers the day before would expand the impact of Russia’s law on “undesirable” organizations.
One bill would extend the ban on participating in activities of organizations blacklisted by Russian authorities as “undesirable” beyond the country’s borders, allowing the government to ban foreigners residing in Russia and stateless persons from taking part in the activities of such groups.
It also would allow the Russian authorities to designate a foreign or international organization as “undesirable” if they decide that such a group acts as an “intermediary,” transferring funds or property to support the operations of “undesirables.”
Another new bill involving “undesirables” introduces amendments to the Russian Criminal and Criminal Procedural codes to make it easier to open criminal cases on charges of affiliation with “undesirable” organizations.
‘Death By A Thousand Cuts’
The third bill would allow the authorities to impose lengthy bans on potential candidates for the parliament’s lower chamber, the State Duma, if they are associated with groups deemed “extremist,” even if they were associated with the group before it received that designation.
“These bills are a far-from-subtle attempt to deprive the Kremlin’s political opponents of legal means of political participation and to instill ever more fear into Russia’s civil society.
“For years now, and with particular ferocity in the past six months, the Russian authorities have been trying to inflict death by a thousand cuts on civil society and meaningful political opposition,” Hugh Williamson, HRW’s Europe and Central Asia director said in the statement.
The bills appear to be thinly veiled attempts to target Russian politicians and activists even remotely associated with jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK).
A court in Moscow is expected to designate the FBK and Navalny’s two other groups — the Citizens’ Rights Defense Foundation and his regional teams — “extremist” later this month following a request by the city’s prosecutors. One FBK lawyer, Lyubov Sobol, has announced her intention to run for a seat in the State Duma in September.
HRW emphasized that it was “hardly a coincidence that the bills are being proposed only a few months before the September parliamentary elections.”
“There appears to be a clear aim to isolate Russia’s civil society and force many of its activists abroad into self-imposed exile under a threat of criminal sanctions, as well as to delegitimize and punish anyone affiliated with or actively supporting…Navalny,” Williamson said.
“Russian authorities need to stop the attempts to drag the country behind a new Iron Curtain and start demonstrating respect for fundamental human rights and democratic values.”
The pressure on Navalny has intensified greatly in the past eight months, starting with his poisoning in Siberia in August 2020.
But it goes back at least as far as December 2011, when Navalny helped lead protests prompted by anger over evidence of election fraud that benefited the Kremlin-controlled United Russia party and dismay at Vladimir Putin’s plans to return to the presidency in 2012 after four years as prime minister.
The elections must be held by September 19 and the United Russia party has been polling at historically low levels. Many observers link this to the government’s latest crackdown on Navalny and his colleagues, as well as on other dissenters and independent media outlets.
The Group of Seven (G7) advanced democracies has wrapped up its first in-person meeting in more than two years with a pledge to bolster collective efforts to counter Russia’s “irresponsible and destabilizing” behavior, but offered little concrete action aside from expressing support for Ukraine.
“We are deeply concerned that the negative pattern of Russia’s irresponsible and destabilizing behavior continues,” the top diplomats of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States said in a joint statement on May 5 following talks in London.
The ministers cited “the large buildup of Russian military forces on Ukraine’s borders and in illegally annexed Crimea, its malign activities aimed at undermining other countries’ democratic systems, its malicious cyberactivity, and use of disinformation.”
“We nevertheless will continue to bolster our collective capabilities and those of our partners to address and deter Russian behavior that is threatening the rules-based international order, including in the areas of cyberspace security and disinformation,” the statement said.
The G7 meeting set the tone for next month’s summit of the group’s leaders in Cornwall, England.
It came amid heightened tensions between Russia and the West over issues including Russia’s military threats to Ukraine, alleged meddling in elections in the United States and other democracies, alleged state-backed hacking, and the poisoning and jailing of Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny.
Russia’s recent military buildup near the Ukrainian border and in Crimea, seized by Moscow in March 2014, has raised concerns about a major escalation of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, where fighting between government forces and Moscow-backed separatists has killed more than 13,000 people since April 2014.
The Russian military said last week that most of its troops had returned to their permanent bases.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was flying to Kviv after the G7 meeting to “underscore unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression” and to “encourage progress on Ukraine’s reform agenda,” according to the State Department.
In their statement, the G7 ministers said they were “deeply concerned about the deteriorating human rights situation in Russia, and the systematic crackdown on opposition voices, human rights defenders, independent civil society, and media.”
On Belarus, they raised their concerns about “the political and human rights crisis following the fraudulent” August 2020 presidential election, and called on the authorities to “hold new, free, and fair elections conducted under international observation.”
Condemning Iran’s support to “proxy forces and non-state armed actors,” the G7 ministers called on Tehran to “refrain from destabilising actions, and play a constructive role in fostering regional stability and peace.”
They also called on Tehran to release foreign and dual nationals they said were being held arbitrarily in Iranian prisons.
The statement also criticized China for “arbitrary, coercive economic policies and practices” and urged it to stick to international trade rules and “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms,” in particular among ethnic and religious minority groups such as mostly Muslim ethnic Uyghurs in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Despite a lack of material evidence, and no established intention of harm, a trio of Russian 14-year-olds are facing lengthy prison sentences after being charged with “training for terrorist activities” in a case that initially alleged the schoolboys were planning to destroy a virtual Federal Security Services (FSB) building they created in the popular computer game Minecraft.
The case, which has attracted widespread attention due to the age of the accused and the notion that child’s play could constitute terrorism, appears to have entered a sort of legal Nether — Minecraft’s hell-like alternate dimension.
Russia’s Investigative Committee earlier this year dismissed the original case opened in November against schoolmates Nikita Uvarov, Denis Mikhailenko, and Bogdan Andreyev after determining that their relationship did not have the necessary structure, subdivisions, or distribution of functions “to regard this group as a terrorist community.”
And the remaining charges against them under Article 205.3 of the Russian Criminal Code — “training for the purpose of carrying out terrorist activities” — no longer cite their alleged plans to “blow up” an “FSB building” in Minecraft as evidence they had established an online terrorist network.
But the pupils at School No. 21 in the Krasnoyarsk Krai city of Kansk are not in safe mode by any means: The three still face from seven to 10 years in prison on charges that stem from their detention nearly a year ago for pasting leaflets supporting a jailed anarchist on the local FSB department building.
A screenshot from Minecraft, the computer game in which the teenagers were purportedly “training for terrorist activities.”
Following their arrest in June after two days of interrogation, investigators determined that the boys had constructed at least one Molotov cocktail and set it alight in Kansk in March 2020. The following May, prosecutors allege, the three used another Molotov cocktail to set fire to an abandoned building.
And at some point between late May and early June they allegedly produced and detonated an “Ammokisa” explosive, for which investigators did not provide a gauge of strength but which was reportedly a crude and weak device using antiseptic tablets.
To buttress the argument that the three were engaged in dangerous activities, investigators have reportedly homed in on communication shared between the three on Telegram and VKontakte in which they discussed the American rock musician Kurt Cobain and his “fierce revolutionary struggle,” the “Yellow Vests” movement in France and anti-government protests in Belarus, and the tsarist-era Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin.
‘Rude’ Boys
The three schoolboys have been described by their parents and school officials as curious yet rebellious students with an interest in anarchy.
“They were normal children, like usual, like other kids,” school director Sergei Kreminsky told Current Time in September, three months after they were arrested after pasting leaflets supporting jailed university student Azat Miftakhov on the building of the local FSB department. “In the case of some of their parents there was insufficient control. They were rude, snapped sometimes at school.”
That the three were facing serious charges, the school director and current City Council deputy representing the pro-Kremlin United Russia party said: “Well, since the investigation is under way, it means they are guilty, I think. What else?”
The boys did not hide their interest in chemistry from their parents, and Svetlana Mikhailenko, Denis’s mother, told Current Time recently that she was aware of their pyrotechnic activities.
“I always knew where the child was, even when they were making these bombs,” she said. “But it was a small, childish prank, a child’s bomb.”
Photos displayed in Denis Mikhailenko’s home, showing the teenager as a young boy.
Svetlana Mikhailenko also told the Russian-language media network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA that the investigators skewed the boys’ testimony, replacing their description of the devices as “bombochki” — little bombs — with “bombs,” and focusing on the amount of material required to make them.
Anna Uvarova, Nikita’s mother, spoke to Current Time following an April 16 court hearing. She said in the family’s apartment that following her son’s detention in June, investigators searched her home from 9 p.m. until 5 a.m., seizing but eventually returning a toy musket that she shows to the cameras.
But after they realized that a case was being built against the three boys, “we looked at what was in their phones” and saw that they had recorded a video of them throwing a Molotov cocktail.
‘Evidence’ Working Against Them
The case against the three boys contains no material evidence — no caches of explosives, no weapons. And while Vladimir Vasin, a lawyer for the Russian legal-defense organization Agora who is representing Uvarov, cited a previous case in which an activist in Russia was imprisoned for 10 years for throwing a Molotov cocktail in a public case, in this case there was no harm, and no intention of harm.
“The guys were really cooking something up with chemicals and were playing with something,” Vasin said. “But they went far into a field, to a deserted place, and did it there.”
Russian lawyer.Vladimir Vasin
“One was very fond of history, the other loved chemistry,” he said of the boys. “And as I know my client, he had no thoughts of doing anything” more.
Unfortunately, Vasin said, to Russian prosecutors “the go-to recipe is a confession — the queen of evidence.”
Mikhailenko and Andreyev each provided confessions of guilt — while facing a mix of “pressure, threats, and promises,” according to the news site Baza — to “undergoing training in order to carry out terrorist activities” following the initial interrogations into their pasting leaflets on the FSB building.
The two have since retracted their confessions and Mikhailenko’s mother, in comments to Current time, said that investigators tricked the parents into implicating their own children.
Uvarov refused to confess — a decision the teens’ parents believe led the FSB to accuse him of being the leader of a group they say never existed, and of sending him immediately to pretrial detention, where he has remained for 11 months.
Close Comparisons
The case has drawn comparisons to other cases in which young people in Russia with views not in step with the official line have been accused of extremism and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences.
Miftakhov, the avowed anarchist and graduate student at Moscow State University for whom the three teens were expressing support in their leaflets, stands as a prominent example.
In January, the 25-year-old was sentenced to six years in prison for aggravated “hooliganism” after being found guilty of involvement in an arson attack against the ruling United Russia party’s office in Moscow in 2018.
The Russian human rights organization Memorial has said that his body showed signs of torture that Miftakhov, who denies the charges against him, said were the result of investigators’ attempts to force a confession.
In late 2020, eight young men and women were found guilty of charges that they had created an extremist group called New Greatness with the intention of overthrowing President Vladimir Putin’s government. The eight received punishments ranging from four-year suspended sentences to seven years’ imprisonment after an FSB agent infiltrated their chat group and suggested they turn it into a political movement.
Another alleged member received an 18-month prison sentence in 2019 after cutting a deal with investigators, and yet another left the country and applied for asylum in Ukraine. All 10 are considered by Memorial to be political prisoners.
Also in 2020, a regional court’s decision in Penza was described as “heinous” after seven activists belonging to a group called Set — or the Network — were sentenced to prison terms of six to 18 years after being found guilty of planning terrorist attacks to destabilize Russia’s presidential election and hosting of the World Cup in 2018.
The defendants all said the group never existed, and that while they shared anti-fascist views they merely played BB-gun war games together. Several of the young men said they were subjected to torture in order to extract their confessions.
Human rights groups believe the case was fabricated by the state as a signal to others who express political views that run counter to the government.
Date With Destiny
Today, Nikita Uvarov, Denis Mikhailenko, and Bogdan Andreyev sit in pretrial detention awaiting their own trial, for which a date has yet to be set.
Uvarov’s lawyer Vasin, speaking while riding on a train to see his client, falls short of saying the entire case was fabricated, but does note that there have been three cases accusing adolescents of terrorism in Krasnoyarsk Krai in the last year alone.
He said he struggles to imagine how such situations involving youths play out.
“My colleagues and I were discussing how it could have been done — invite the police to the children’s room, I don’t know, to summon the director of the school to for a meeting” to try to talk and sort things out,” Vasin said. “But instead, boom! — immediately to interrogation. Two days of interrogation. A third interrogation. Endless interrogations.”
Ten years ago, he said, the matter might have been settled by a spanking with a belt, but “now everything is different. And it will get worse.”
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Michael Scollon based on reporting in Krasnoyarsk Krai by Current Time correspondents Aleksei Aleksandrov and Kirill Ralev
Due to COVID-19 restrictions a women’s prison in the Latvian capital, Riga, and a farm were among the unlikely venues for a Russian documentary film festival. ArtDocFest is held in Moscow every year, but amid growing repression and intimidation began holding events in Riga in 2014. This year’s top prize winner was Silent Voice, the story of a gay Chechen MMA fighter who fled to Belgium after getting death threats.
The media-freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says the Russian government’s “draconian and defamatory” decision to list the Meduza website as a “foreign agent” may force one of the country’s most popular independent news sites to shut down.
The listing is “a massive blow to media pluralism in Russia,” the Paris-based RSF said in a May 5 statement.
“We call on the Russian Justice Ministry to abolish this draconian and defamatory register of ‘foreign agent’ media, which exists solely to enable the government to tighten its grip on the press,” said Jeanne Cavelier, RSF’s director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Meduza, which is based in Latvia, is one of Russia’s most popular and influential media outlets, claiming some 13 million unique visitors each month.
The Russian government included Meduza in the “foreign agent” register on April 23. Meduza is appealing the designation and has launched a crowd-funding campaign to compensate for lost advertising revenues that forced it to curtail operations.
Just in the last week, Meduza closed its offices in Riga and Moscow, slashed staff salaries, and halted the use of freelancers.
The European Union on April 24 said “it is extremely concerning that Russian authorities continue to restrict the work of independent media platforms, as well as individual journalists and other media actors.”
Russia’s so-called “foreign agent” legislation was adopted in 2012 and has been modified repeatedly.
It requires nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign assistance and that the government deems to be engaged in political activity to be registered, to identify themselves as “foreign agents,” and to submit to audits.
Later modifications of the law targeted foreign-funded media, including RFE/RL’s Russian Service, six other RFE/RL Russian-language news services, and Current Time, a network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
Earlier this year, Russian courts began imposing large fines against RFE/RL for failing to mark its articles with a government-prescribed label. RFE/RL is appealing the fines.
RFE/RL has called the fines “a state-sponsored campaign of coercion and intimidation,” while the U.S. State Department has described them as “intolerable.”
Human Rights Watch has described the “foreign agent” legislation as “restrictive” and intended “to demonize independent groups.”
As President Vladimir Putin’s government intensifies its crackdown on all forms of dissent, many Russians who oppose him have found inspiration in the closing remarks Moscow State University student Olga Misik made last week at her trial.
Writer Nikolai Kononov posted on Twitter that the speech Misik made in court on April 29 “will end up in school textbooks.”
St. Petersburg artist Yuly Rybakov shared Misik’s remarks in full on Facebook and wrote: “With such children, Russia does have a future!”
The student’s defiant speech joins the ranks of the impassioned courtroom addresses of dissidents that have characterized the two decades of Putin’s rule and go back at least as far as the Soviet era.
Misik and two other young defendants, Ivan Vorobyevsky and Igor Basharimov, are charged with vandalizing government buildings. In a gesture of support for those they consider political prisoners, they hung banners on a railing outside a Moscow district court on August 8, 2020, and then splattered red paint on a security booth outside the Prosecutor-General’s Office building. Prosecutors claim they caused 3,500 rubles ($47) in damages.
Defense attorneys say that the documents provided by prosecutors concerning the alleged damages were falsified and that no harm was caused by the water-soluble paint.
Under the charges, they could face up to three years in prison when Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court delivers its decision on May 11. Prosecutors, however, have asked for two years of “restricted liberty” for Misik and one year and 10 months for the other defendants, according to the independent OVD-Info monitoring agency. During the trial, the defendants have been under a limited form of house arrest, unable to leave home between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., to approach within 10 meters of government buildings, to attend public events, or to use means of communication.
Misik, who turned 19 in January, has long been actively involved in protests against Putin’s government. She attracted national attention in August 2019 during a protest against the government’s decision to disqualify virtually all the opposition candidates running for seats on the Moscow City Duma.
Misik protested by reading the Russian Constitution out loud to a heavily armed phalanx of riot police in body armor – an act that for many distilled the relationship between the Russian state and the people in recent years.
Olga Misik reads the Russian Constitution in front of a phalanx of riot police at a protest in Moscow in July 2019.
In October 2019, she was detained on Red Square while conducting a one-person picket by holding up a large piece of blank paper.
In February 2020, she was detained in Penza while organizing a demonstration of support for the accused in the so-called Network (“Set”) case, which activists say was fabricated by the security forces.
In her closing speech to the court in the vandalism case, Misik insisted that she had never been afraid during her years of activism.
“I am often asked if I am afraid,” she told the court. “More often by people from abroad than those in Russia because they don’t know the specifics of our lives…. They don’t know the feeling of hopelessness that we take in with our mother’s milk. And that very feeling of hopelessness atrophies all signs of fear and infects us with a learned helplessness. What is the point of being afraid if your future does not depend on you.”
“I was never afraid,” she said. “I felt despair, helplessness, hopelessness, confusion, anxiety, despair, anger, but neither politics nor activism every infected me with the feeling of fear.”
‘Sad And Sickened But Not Scared’
Misik said she was not afraid when police came to arrest her in the middle of the night and threatened her with prison.
“I joked and laughed because I knew that as soon as I stopped smiling, I had lost,” she told the court.
She added that she was not afraid when the police van drove her away or when she remembered her father, whom she saw cry for the first time in her life.
“I was sad and sickened, but not scared,” she said.
Misik added, though, that she began to be afraid and to experience panic only after she found herself under modified house arrest.
“And now it seems to me that all the fear that has accumulated in me over the last nine months is concentrated here and now in my final speech, because public speaking is more frightening to me than the prospect of being sentenced,” Misik said.
“Someone once said that you can’t be afraid if you know that you are right,” she continued. “But Russia teaches us to be afraid all the time. It is a country that is trying to kill you every day. And if you are not part of the system, you are already as good as dead.”
She said that in her support of those unjustly imprisoned, she thought about her future children.
“When my children ask me what I was when all this happened, when they ask how I could allow this to happen and what did I do to fix it, I won’t have anything to tell them,” she said. “What can I say? That I held a picket outside the FSB? That is laughable.”
And then she asked Judge Aleksei Stekliyev: “And what about your children? When they ask you where you were when this happened, how will you answer them? That you handed down the guilty verdicts?”
She stated that she did not regret participating in the vandalism protest.
“If I could go back in time, I’d do it again,” she said. “Even if the death penalty threatened me, I’d do it again. And I’d do it again and again and again…. They say that repeating the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is madness. Then hope is madness. And ceasing to do what you consider right because everyone around you thinks it is hopeless is surrendering to helplessness. I would rather look insane to your eyes than helpless to mine.”
‘We Will Win’
She closed her speech with a reference to Sophie Scholl, a Munich university student who together with her brother, Hans, was executed by guillotine in 1943 for her resistance to the regime of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
“She was condemned for leaflets and graffiti, while I have been tried for posters and paint,” Misik said. “Essentially, we were both persecuted for thought crimes. My trial has been very similar to Sophie’s trial and today’s Russia is very similar to fascist Germany. Even facing the guillotine, Sophie did not abandon her convictions and her example has inspired me not to seek a deal. Sophie Scholl is the embodiment of youth, sincerity, and liberty. And I really hope that I am in this way like her.”
“The fascist regime collapsed in the end, just as the fascist regime in Russia will fall,” she said. “I don’t know when this will happen – a week, a year, a decade. But I know that we will win because love and youth always win.”
Olga Misik at a Moscow protest in 2019.
The transcript of Misik’s speech has been shared widely on social media, and more than 45,000 people have signed an online petition calling for her release.
Andrei Chvanov, from Tatarstan, wrote on Facebook: “I just read her final speech. And you know what? I felt ashamed. Because my threshold of fear is much lower…. She holds strong, jokes, writes, and is 100 percent sure that she is right. And she is right. She sees the truth. And she is not afraid. Not many people in our country have such a gift.”
Another Facebook user urged people to “help Olga Misik, if only because her closing statement is the strongest closing statement of all those I have read.”
“It is a very powerful statement,” another user wrote on Facebook. “It will force the judges and prosecutors to think about what Russia will be like tomorrow. To see that there are inalienable human rights.”
RFE/RL’s Russian Service contributed to this report
XALQOBOD, Uzbekistan — A prosecutor in Uzbekistan’s southern Surxondaryo region has asked a court to sentence blogger Otabek Sattoriy to 11 years in prison in a high-profile extortion and slander case that has drawn harsh criticism from domestic and international human rights groups.
The prosecutor said in a statement at the Muzrabot district court during closing arguments on May 4 that Sattoriy “does not deserve a mitigated punishment,” since he has refused to accept blame and has not paid compensation to his alleged victims.
Sattoriy, whose trial started in March, has said that the case against him was fabricated and “based on lies.”
The 40-year-old blogger was charged with extortion, slander and insult, which his supporters and rights defenders have characterized as retaliation by the authorities for his critical reporting.
Sattoriy is known to be a harsh critic of the regional governor, Tora Bobolov. In one post on his Halq Fikiri (People’s Opinion) video blog, Sattoriy openly accused the local government of launching fabricated criminal cases against bloggers and vowed to continue to raise the issue of corruption among officials despite the “crackdown.”
Since his arrest in late January, Sattoriy has been tried in a separate case and found guilty of defamation and spreading false information. According to the Prosecutor-General’s Office, the blogger was ordered to pay a fine for the offenses.
The Prosecutor-General’s Office also rejected criticism by human rights organizations, saying that Sattoriy’s arrest was lawful.
Uzbekistan is ranked 156th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2020 World Press Freedom Index.
Last month, the Committee to Protect Journalists urged Uzbekistan to repeal recent legal amendments that the group said “deepen restrictions” on online speech ahead of a planned presidential election in October.
The changes introduce prison sentences for crimes such as insulting or defaming the president online and making online calls for “mass disturbances.” They also make it an offense to publish statements online calling on people to violate the law and threaten public order, or show “disrespect” to the state.
President Shavkat Mirziyoev took over as head of Central Asia’s most-populous state after authoritarian leader Islam Karimov’s death was announced in September 2016.
Mirziyoev has since positioned himself as a reformer, releasing political prisoners and opening his country to its neighbors and the outside world, although many activists say the changes have not gone nearly far enough.
MOSCOW — A Moscow court has agreed to hear a libel lawsuit filed by Aleksei Navalny against Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov over comments he made linking U.S. spies with the jailed opposition politician.
Open Media group quoted a representative of the Presnensky district court on May 5 as saying that Navalny, who is serving a prison term in a penal colony, will be able to take part in the hearing if he wishes and if the judge agrees with that.
The date of the hearing into the lawsuit filed by Navalny in late March is yet to be determined.
It is the second lawsuit Navalny has filed against Peskov in defense of his “honor, dignity, and business reputation.”
An initial lawsuit was filed in November 2020 when Navalny demanded the Kremlin publish on its official website his rebuttal of public statements Peskov made saying that CIA specialists are “working with Navalny” and that the contents of Navalny’s statements, including those criticizing President Vladimir Putin, are prepared by the U.S. secret service.
The court refused to register the lawsuit at the time, citing “procedural shortcomings.” It was then refiled.
Navalny was arrested in January upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he received life-saving treatment for a poisoning attack in Siberia in August.
He blames the poisoning with a Soviet-style chemical nerve agent on Putin and Russia’s security services. The Kremlin has denied any role in the poisoning.
In February, a Moscow court ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated. He is currently serving a 2 1/2 year sentence at a prison in the Vladimir region.
Navalny’s incarceration sparked numerous protests across Russia which were violently dispersed by police.
An Iranian diplomat’s 20-year prison sentence in Belgium for plotting to bomb an opposition rally outside Paris has been confirmed after he dropped plans to appeal.
The confirmation of the sentence came after Vienna-based diplomat Assadolah Assadi dropped his appeal, his lawyers said on May 5.
Assadi was found guilty on February 4 of attempted terrorism after a plot to bomb a rally of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an exiled opposition group, near Paris in June 2018.
Three other defendants also received jail sentences.
The planned attack on the rally was thwarted by a coordinated operation between French, German, and Belgian security services.
The sentence was strongly condemned by the Iranian government, which repeatedly dismissed the charges, saying the allegations by the NCRI, which Tehran considers a terrorist group, are false.
The NCRI is the political wing of the exiled Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an exiled opposition group that is seeking to overthrow the Islamic republic.
Prosecution lawyer Georges-Henri Beauthier said in Antwerp on May 5 that there were guarantees from the Belgium state that there would be no swap of Assadi for Western prisoners in Iran. Beauthier cited a separation of powers between justice and political decisions.
“The Belgian government will not discuss [a prisoner swap],” he said.
Assadi’s trial was the first time an Iranian official had been tried for suspected terrorism in Europe since Iran’s 1979 revolution.
Assadi was arrested in Germany before being transferred to Belgium for trial. In its ruling, the Belgium court said he was running an Iranian state intelligence network and was acting on orders from Tehran.
A group of Russian lawmakers has proposed legislation that would bar individuals involved in the activities of a public or religious group, or any organization that has been recognized by a court as “extremist or terrorist,” from taking part in parliamentary elections.
The draft bill, put forward just ahead of September elections to the parliament’s lower chamber, the State Duma, states that ordinary employees and leaders of such organizations cannot be elected as lawmakers if they worked in such groups for one and three years, respectively, before a court’s decision to ban such groups.
The bill also says that individuals who “provided financial support, property, as well as organizational, methodical, consultative, or any other type of assistance” to such organizations one year before the organization was banned will be barred from taking part in parliamentary elections for three years.
The move comes on the heels of Moscow prosecutors asking a court to recognize jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s regional network, along with his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) and his Citizens’ Rights Defense Foundation (FZPG), as extremist organizations.
The Moscow City Court has said it will rule on the motion on May 17.
Leonid Volkov, a close associate of Navalny, says the draft bill is aimed squarely at the Kremlin critic, his supporters, and the staff members at its organizations.
“We have seen a mass of ‘laws against Navalny,’ but nothing this harsh. Contributed even just a penny to the FBK in the last year — you cannot be elected to the State Duma. Worked as a coordinator for Navalny’s team in the last three years — you cannot be elected to the State Duma. Just read [the draft bill], there is fear in every sentence, ” Volkov wrote on Telegram.
The pressure on Navalny has intensified greatly in the past eight months, starting with his poisoning in Siberia last August. But it goes back at least as far as December 2011, when Navalny helped lead protests prompted by anger over evidence of election fraud that benefited the Kremlin-controlled United Russia party and dismay at Vladimir Putin’s plans to return to the presidency in 2012 after four years as prime minister.
The elections must be held by September 19, and the United Russia party has been polling at historically low levels. Many observers link this to the government’s latest crackdown on Navalny and his colleagues, as well as on other dissenters and independent media outlets.
Lyubov Sobol, another close Navalny associate and a lawyer for the FBK who has announced her intention to run for a seat in the State Duma in September, told Current Time that the move by lawmakers is “a demonstration of United Russia’s weakness.”
“I think I am the person that the Kremlin [and] United Russia are scared of. And they will try, using that bill, to prevent me from taking part in the elections to the State Duma because they understand that if I am registered, I will win…. Because Moscow residents want change, they want decent, strong, and independent politicians…. The fact that they will try to label us as extremists to ban our participation in the elections shows that they are really afraid of us,” Sobol said.
Volkov announced on April 29 that Navalny’s regional network will be disbanded ahead of the Moscow City Court hearing on May 17 to avoid the prosecution of staff members.
Lawyers have filed a criminal complaint in Germany on behalf of 10 Belarusians alleging that authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka has committed crimes against humanity.
Acting on behalf of “torture victims,” the lawyers said on May 5 that they have submitted a complaint to federal prosecutors in the German city of Karlsruhe against Lukashenka “and other Belarusian security officers.”
The lawyers stressed that neither Lukashenka nor his security officers face legal consequences in Belarus for their excessive use of force and the torture of citizens detained in the country. Thus, they said, they are calling on Germany to conduct an independent investigation into the alleged crimes.
The lawyers referred to so-called universal jurisdiction, which provides for the possibility of criminal prosecution for crimes that break international law even when they are committed in other states.
“In general, the actions of the authorities can only be called brutal,” the lawyers said in a statement.
The 66-year-old Lukashenka, who has run the country since 1994, was officially declared the victor of the August 9, 2020, presidential election by a landslide, triggering almost daily protests demanding that the longtime strongman step down and new elections be held.
The opposition says the vote was rigged, and the West has refused to recognize Lukashenka as the legitimate leader of Belarus.
Security officials have cracked down hard on the demonstrators, arresting thousands, including dozens of journalists who covered the rallies, and pushing most of the top opposition figures out of the country.
Several protesters have been killed in the violence and some rights organizations say there is credible evidence of torture being used by security officials against some of those detained.
“This is the first step towards the inevitable recognition of the regime as a terrorist organization with all the ensuing consequences,” the German media outlet Deutsche Welle quoted a representative of the Belarusian diaspora in Germany as saying.
BISHKEK — Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov has signed into law a bill on constitutional amendments approved by a nationwide referendum last month that has been criticized by his opponents as a move to concentrate more powers in his hands.
The signing ceremony held on May 5 started with a minute of silence to commemorate 36 Kyrgyz nationals killed in last week’s clashes along a disputed segment of the Kyrgyz-Tajik border.
Japarov addressed the nation after the signing ceremony, calling the April 28-29 violence along the border “an attempt to violate Kyrgyzstan’s territorial integrity” and vowing to assist affected villages to get back to normal as soon as possible.
“None of presidents before me faced economic problems of the current proportions. I inherited a devastated economy, a state treasury with a deficit of 20 billion soms ($236 million),” Japarov said, adding that despite “economic hardships that have deepened due to pandemic crisis,” he will do “everything I can to revive economy and business activities.”
Kyrgyz citizens approved the bill on constitutional amendments on April 11, but the full text of the amended constitution is yet to be made public.
The new constitution reduces the size of parliament by 25 percent to 90 seats and gives the president the power to appoint judges and heads of law enforcement agencies. It also calls for establishing “a consultative and coordinating body” that would be controlled by the president. Critics say it could act as a parallel parliament and a way for the president to exert more power.
The referendum came three months after Japarov was elected president following a tumultuous period that saw the ouster of the previous government amid protests over October parliamentary elections and months of political wrangling over the future of the Central Asian country.
Japarov proposed drafting a new constitution in November 2020 as he emerged from the turmoil as acting president in the wake of the resignation of then-President Sooronbai Jeenbekov.
He easily won the presidential election in January, while a referendum held in tandem saw voters opt for a presidential system that was the centerpiece of the proposed constitutional amendments.
Some in the former Soviet republic have criticized Japarov, saying the new constitution was being rushed through to create an authoritarian system while concentrating too much power into the hands of the president.
Japarov was among several prominent politicians freed from prison by protesters during the October unrest. He had been serving a 10-year prison sentence for hostage-taking during a protest against a mining operation in northeast Kyrgyzstan in October 2013. He maintains the charges against him were politically motivated.
May 5 has been marked in the country as the Constitution Day since the first constitution was approved by the parliament of independent Kyrgyzstan on that day in 1993.
Welcome back to the China In Eurasia briefing, an RFFE/RL newsletter tracking China’s resurgent influence from Eastern Europe to Central Asia.
Big news! The China In Eurasia newsletter will now be going out twice a month. Expect to see it in your inbox on the first and third Wednesdays of each month. I’m RFE/RL correspondent Reid Standish and here’s what I’m following right now.
China Takes Center Stage In Europe
Debt problems and transparency concerns pushed Beijing’s projects across Europe into the spotlight this month. A controversial Beijing-financed highway project in Montenegro and a $1.5 billion loan to build a Chinese university in Hungary have rung alarm bells in Brussels as both ventures pointed to growing influence within the European Union and on its doorstep.
Finding Perspective: Hungary signed a deal with Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University in late April that would open a campus in Budapest by 2024.
Leaked documents show that the campus will cost $1.8 billion and that the Hungarian government will take out a $1.5 Chinese loan to cover the majority of the cost.
The plans are controversial for a host of reasons, as I reported this week with my colleague Akos Keller-Alant from RFE/RL’s Hungarian Service.
Opposition politicians in Hungary raised concerns over potential debt problems and that Hungarian taxpayers are footing the bill for a private Chinese university, pointing out that the proposed project will cost more than what the government spends annually on higher education across the entire country.
Many details around the project and the Chinese loan are also hidden, which Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony told us is one of the reasons why he’s trying to block the campus from being built.
Meanwhile, Montenegro asked the EU in April for help in paying back its $1 billion debt to China for a still-to-be-completed highway to Serbia, which I explored in an article with Asja Hafner, Gjeraqina Tuhina, and Slavica Brajovic from RFE/RL’s Balkan Service.
The EU rebuffed those calls to help pay off the loan, which was signed by the previous government, leaving the cash-strapped Balkan country in a precarious situation as its first debt payments are due this summer.
Why It Matters: Both cases point to rising concern in Brussels (and Washington) over Chinese lending practices and debts, which could open the door to further political and economic influence by Beijing.
But the examples also highlight the role that Chinese cash occupies in domestic politics.
In Hungary, China is a useful card for Prime Minister Viktor Orban to play in his standoff with the EU. His strong relationship with Beijing has also given him cover as the country’s democratic institutions have eroded under his watch.
Read More
My colleague Predrag Tomovic from RFE/RL’s Balkan Service looked at details of the contract that Montenegro signed with the Export-Import Bank of China, focusing on the clause that could allow the bank to seize assets if the government can’t meet its debt payments.
For added context on what’s motivating ties between Beijing and Budapest, this quote from my interview with Tamas Matura, an assistant professor at Corvinus University in Budapest, is illuminating: “None of these ideas are coming from China. They are coming from the Hungarian side, but, of course, Beijing is happy to go along with them.”
RFE/RL’s Hungarian Service spoke with local expert Gyorgy Tilesch about security concerns over Budapest hosting Fudan University, which has known ties to China’s intelligence services.
Expert Corner: Just How Close Are Beijing And Moscow?
Readers asked: “Is Europe becoming the new dividing line between China and the United States?”
“Europe sees itself as a moderating force in the escalating competition between the United States and China. For economic and political reasons, it is pushing back against the notion of a zero-sum world and refusing to choose sides. Walking this geopolitical tightrope will be increasingly challenging. China may welcome a nonaligned Europe, but U.S. politicians will find it very difficult to swallow.” — Noah Barkin, author of the German Marshall Fund’s Watching China In Europe newsletter and managing editor with Rhodium Group’s China practice
Do you have a question about China’s growing footprint in Eurasia? Send it to me at StandishR@rferl.org and I’ll get it answered by leading experts and policymakers.
Three More Stories From Eurasia
1. Playing The Long Game
Beijing is preparing for fallout from U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, where China is looking to wield more influence but is cautious about getting too involved in the country’s chaos.
Evolving Interests: China shares a 76-kilometer border with Afghanistan and has preferred a low-key approach toward its unstable neighbor, but that’s slowly changing, which I wrote about with my colleague Ajmal Aand from RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan.
Beijing’s main concern is about Afghanistan becoming a haven for Uyghur radicals and other fundamentalists angered by Beijing’s repressive policies toward ethnic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang to launch a cross-border insurgency.
China has also been lured by Afghanistan’s mineral riches, with Chinese companies announcing investments worth billions of dollars in copper mining and oil exploration, although ongoing instability has left those ventures on hold.
Reality Check: China will look to ramp up its diplomatic efforts and protect its interests, but the country has no desire to fill the vacuum left by the United States in Afghanistan.
2. Xinjiang Continues To Ripple Across Eurasia
The fallout from China’s ongoing internment of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang region continues to reverberate across Central Asia and beyond.
The Local: As RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service reported, three ethnic Kazakhs who claimed asylum in Kazakhstan after crossing the border illegally from Xinjiang are asking the government for permission to leave the country.
Despite receiving temporary asylum, none of the three people are able to work legally in the country and have no path to citizenship or permanent residency under Kazakh law. In the face of these difficulties, they’re pushing the Kazakh government to allow them to leave for a third country.
Meanwhile, Raqyzhan Zeinolla, a 58-year old naturalized Kazakh citizen, was released in April after being imprisoned in China for 17 years. Zeinolla was arrested in 2004 during a visit to Xinjiang and accused of being a spy, where he then did stints in prison and a so-called “reeducation camp.”
The Global: The watchdog group Human Rights Watch declared in April that the Chinese government is committing crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other groups in Xinjiang.
The Rand Corporation also released a new study where the authors examined satellite photos of Xinjiang to show the massive expansion of detention facilities in the area.
3. Deciphering The Belt And Road
China is the world’s largest official creditor, but many of the basic facts around Beijing’s foreign lending are still unknown.
In the hopes of pulling the curtain back on these practices, I interviewed Scott Morris, one of the authors of a recent study by the Center for Global Development that did a first-of-its-kind analysis of 100 Chinese contracts across 24 developing countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
Main Takeaways: The study finds that Chinese contracts have a host of unique features that are unusual even for the murky world of international lending.
A strong reliance on secrecy is common among Chinese contracts, while many deals contain clauses that prevent collective-debt restructuring and allow Beijing to cancel debt or accelerate repayments, which Morris says could potentially influence the policies of debtor countries.
Despite the restrictive nature of the deals, Morris pushes back on so-called “debt-trap diplomacy,” the idea that Beijing is deliberately trying to get countries into debt in order to increase its influence over them.
Instead, he says that after the analysis of the contracts, it’s clear that “Chinese entities are issuing loans with the full intention of getting their money back.”
Across The Supercontinent
It’s Chinatown: A Tajik city bulldozed 30 houses on a picturesque riverbank for a huge Chinese-funded project comprising 1,200 apartment units, a school, car park, and various stores.
My colleague Farangis Najibullah looked at how, six years later, 300 evicted people are still waiting for promised housing.
Front Of The Line: RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service is investigating how Chinese citizens living in Ukraine were vaccinated en masse against COVID-19, while the rest of the country’s rollout continues to move slowly.
Sinopharm Arrives: North Macedonia’s struggling vaccination program got a boost with the arrival of 200,000 doses of China’s Sinopharm vaccine, RFE/RL’s Balkan Service reported.
About 500,000 doses of Sinovac, another Chinese vaccine, are supposed to arrive later this month.
Perception Gap: Despite being outspent by the EU, a majority of Serbs believe that China is the largest provider of aid to Serbia to combat the pandemic — although Iva Martinovic from RFE/RL’s Balkan Service reports that this is changing.
According to a recent study, 56.4 percent of Serbs believe China is the top donor, a drop from 75 percent who thought so in the early stages of the pandemic last year.
One Thing To Watch This Month
How to counter challenges posed by China was an early focus from the May 4 meeting of G7 ministers in London. Western officials say they are not looking to contain China, but rather compete with it.
Ahead of the planned G7 summit next month, expect discussions to pick up around Western alternatives to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The United States, the European Union, Japan, and India are already discussing forming alternatives to Beijing’s infrastructure project and Biden has reportedly asked for it to be included on the summit’s agenda.
That’s all from me for now. Don’t forget to send me any questions, comments, or tips that you might have.
If you enjoyed this briefing and don’t want to miss the next edition, subscribe here. It will be sent to your in-box on the first and third Wednesdays of each month.
Belarusian authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka has issued an order to deprive more than 80 former servicemen and law enforcement officers of their ranks accusing them of actions that are “incompatible” with their status, amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent following a disputed election last year.
Citing the presidential office, state news agency BelTa reported that Lukashenka signed the relevant decree on May 4, saying those deprived from their ranks had “discredited” the “honor and dignity of a serviceman and employee.”
“They showed disrespect for state symbols, threw away their IDs, took off their shoulder straps, and refused to perform their official duties,” the report said.
Criminal cases have been initiated against a number of them and are being investigated, including for organizing acts of terrorism, the report added.
The 66-year-old Lukashenka, who has run the country since 1994, was officially declared the victor of the August 9, 2020 presidential election by a landslide, triggering almost daily protests demanding that the longtime strongman step down and new elections be held.
The opposition says the vote was rigged, and the West has refused to recognize Lukashenka as the legitimate leader of Belarus.
Security officials have cracked down hard on the demonstrators, arresting thousands, including dozens of journalists who covered the rallies, and pushing most of the top opposition figures out of the country.
Several protesters have been killed in the violence and some rights organizations say there is credible evidence of torture being used by security officials against some of those detained.
The latest deadly clashes on the long-restive Kyrgyz-Tajik border drastically alter the situation there and change how the two countries see themselves and each other — with consequences for the leaders in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Previous violence along the border stretching back some 15 years was always localized, involving several villages on opposite sides of the poorly marked or unmarked sections of the frontier. The hostilities usually centered around work near water sources or the construction or alteration of roads, fences, and walls.
The latest conflict on April 28 began much like previous conflicts did.
A group of Tajiks were installing a camera at a water-intake station on Kyrgyz territory that distributed water to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
The events followed a familiar script: Harsh words were exchanged, people gathered from villages on both sides of the border, stones were thrown, border guards arrived, and gunfire broke out.
Gunfire has become increasingly common in these disputes in recent years, but usually local officials from the two countries quickly arrive, calm the feuding villagers, and the groups go back to their sides of the border.
But what began on April 28 went in a different direction.
There was an exchange of gunfire early on April 29 in the area of the intake station. Each side blames the other for starting the shooting.
Tajik forces then launched a coordinated attack along several sections of the border, many kilometers apart, and entered Kyrgyzstan.
More than a dozen villages in Kyrgyzstan came under fire from a mix of machine guns, mortars, and even rockets.
Tajik military helicopters were in the air near some of these villages, with Tajik authorities saying they were used to evacuate Tajik citizens from areas cut off from Tajikistan by the fighting. But photos from the Kyrgyz village of Ortoboz show rockets on the ground that could only come from attack helicopters.
Kyrgyz forces counterattacked and some villages in Tajikistan came under heavy fire as well, with reports of some Kyrgyz troops also temporarily operating on Tajik territory.
With the exception of isolated gunshots along the border, the fighting finally ended on April 30.
But the casualties and the damage from the violence were unprecedented, with at least 36 Kyrgyz and 18 Tajik citizens killed, along with more than 200 injured. Additionally, dozens of homes, shops, and other structures were destroyed or damaged and tens of thousands of people were displaced.
And accusations were flying from both sides about the wanton destruction carried out by the other country’s forces.
Reports from the area indicate that the majority of the material losses were on the Kyrgyz side of the border.
Photo Gallery:
Homes, Schools Destroyed After Worst Violence In Decades On Kyrgyz-Tajik Border
People inspected the charred remains of their homes, schools, and other buildings in villages on both sides of the Tajik-Kyrgyz border after deadly armed clashes along the frontier on April 28-29. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan completed the withdrawal of their military units from the border on May 3 as a cease-fire appeared to be holding.
Both countries are preparing legal cases against the other over the violence, but little is likely to result from that.
Despite their known problems, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are similar in some ways.
Both are poor, mountainous countries that have roughly the same territory with comparable populations. There are about 6.5 million people in Kyrgyzstan and some 9.5 million in Tajikistan.
Tajikistan also borders Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and China, while Kyrgyzstan also shares borders with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and China — all countries that are much larger, more populous, and far better armed than the small militaries in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
These similarities give the countries reasons to work together and have good relations.
But after this latest round of fighting, any kinship that existed has been lost as there are feelings among the Kyrgyz that Tajikistan has attacked Kyrgyzstan, inflicted losses, and that Kyrgyzstan did little to stop it.
And that has angered many Kyrgyz citizens.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reportedly warned Tajikistan not to repeat any aggression against Kyrgyzstan, but otherwise no foreign allies have publicly sided with Bishkek or Dushanbe in this dispute.
Most messages of condolence from other countries have been directed toward Kyrgyzstan, though Bishkek cannot count on more than that, as questions are being raised about how the situation turned out so badly and who among government officials is to blame.
Kamchybek Tashiev, the head of Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee for National Security, on the Kyrgyz-Tajik border on May 2
On May 1, the head of Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee for National Security (UKMK), Kamchybek Tashiev, and his Tajik counterpart, Saymumin Yatimov, met in Kyrgyzstan’s border province of Batken and signed a deal cementing a cease-fire and withdrawing all forces back to their home bases.
Tashiev is a longtime friend of new Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov; his appointment as head of the UKMK owes much to this relationship.
Tashiev said on May 2 that Kyrgyzstan would not make any claims for compensation from Tajikistan for damage done to property in Kyrgyzstan. He added that an agreement on demarcating another 112 kilometers of the border would be ready by May 9.
That would be welcome news, as the root of these violent conflicts are almost always related to a dispute over the shared border, with some 450 kilometers of the 970-kilometer Kyrgyz-Tajik frontier still not demarcated.
But Tashiev has a recent history of prematurely declaring progress on border issues.
After a visit to Uzbekistan in late March, he said the border issue with Uzbekistan was resolved “100 percent.” But that quickly fell apart when villagers on the Kyrgyz side of the border refused to accept proposed land swaps included in the agreement.
Tashiev has also said there was information prior to the April 28-30 fighting that the border situation was worsening, suggesting he knew what could happen but did nothing to prevent it.
Tashiev also failed to explain exactly why he left Kyrgyzstan on April 28. The trip was reportedly to seek medical treatment abroad, though some social-media comments suggested that he traveled to Spain, where his son celebrated a birthday.
There could also be disappointment among Kyrgyz in the country’s new president.
Japarov came to power with populist messages about a Kyrgyzstan that was going to be stronger, something that appealed to his many nationalist supporters.
He has already appeared on state television appealing for calm and a return to good ties with Tajikistan, an indication that Kyrgyzstan is going to just have to accept what happened along the border and move on.
Tajik President Emomali Rahmon visited the Vorukh exclave near the Kyrgyz border in early April.
It will not help that another rumor going around Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is that Tajik President Emomali Rahmon initially refused to take Japarov’s phone calls after the fighting started.
Japarov and other officials have also pledged to fund reconstruction in the region and to restore communities devastated by the violence. Already deeply in debt, it will be tricky for Japarov to keep this promise and still attend to the country’s arrears.
It is difficult to see where Kyrgyz authorities will find funding to completely rebuild homes, gas stations, stores, schools, and other structures damaged or destroyed in the fighting. They also must compensate people for the loss of their livestock, something that has not yet been discussed.
All of this comes as a host of other problems besets Kyrgyzstan, from growing unemployment and rising inflation to a drought and economic issues related to the coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile, in Tajikistan, the unpopular autocratic president seems ready to gain from the latest outcome of the border battles in which his military appeared to act strongly.
Rahmon has worked for years to crush independent media and opposition groups. In the process, his family has amassed a fortune in a country where the average monthly salary is less than $100.
Furthermore, the nearly 70-year-old Rahmon has been grooming his oldest son, Rustam, to take over the presidency, hoping the succession will be accepted by Tajiks.
The recent events along the border provided an unexpected moment of approval that could both ease and accelerate his move toward creating a dynasty in Tajikistan.
Six United Nations rights experts are calling for the immediate release of imprisoned dissident Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Nourizad, who they say is reportedly so ill he risks “serious complications and possible death.”
“We are seriously concerned at the mistreatment of Mohammad Nourizad and his continued imprisonment for expressing his opinion,” the independent UN experts said in a joint statement issued on May 4.
“It is clear that Mohammad Nourizad is not in a medical state to remain in prison,” they said, adding that his continued detention and the denial of adequate medical care “may amount to torture.”
The outspoken Nourizad, who has written and directed several films, has since 2019 been serving a prison sentence totaling over 17 years on charges of allegedly insulting Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to Amnesty International.
Nourizad, who has been arrested several times in the past, is among activists who have publicly called for the resignation of Khamenei.
The experts who signed up to the joint statement included the UN special rapporteurs on the situation of human rights in Iran; on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of expression; on rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association; on the right to physical and mental health; and on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions.
They pointed out that Nourizad had gone on hunger strikes in detention and refused to take medications to protest his imprisonment and his family’s mistreatment by the authorities.
“He has also reportedly attempted suicide in prison, and began to self-harm as a form of protest on February 19,” according to the statement.
This was particularly worrying, it said, since he has been diagnosed with a heart condition and has repeatedly lost consciousness in detention.
He also suffers from diabetes, according to Amnesty International, which last month warned that Iranian authorities were “cruelly toying with the life” of Nourizad.
The UN experts said the filmmaker was transferred to Loghman Hakim Educational Hospital in Tehran on April 14 after fainting, and was injected with a substance he did not know the content of and had not consented to.
They added that the Iranian judiciary’s own legal medical organization and other medical professionals had reportedly found he should be released.
“The Iranian authorities must release him immediately in line with these medical opinions and give him free access to the required medical care and treatment,” they said.
The experts said Nourizad’s treatment reflected that of many detained in Iran for “merely exercising their right to freedom of expression,” including some who have reportedly died due to denial of adequate medical treatment.
“His case is emblematic of the situation many Iranian political activists face in detention,” they said.
