Security forces in Belarus detained dozens of people in the capital, Minsk, as opposition demonstrators staged scattered marches and rallies on December 13 to pressure strongman leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka to make political concessions. Human rights group Vyasna said that nearly 180 people were detained during protests across the country.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
MINSK — Security forces in Belarus have detained dozens of people as opposition demonstrators staged scattered marches and rallies in Minsk and other cities to pressure strongman leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka to make political concessions.
Human rights group Vyasna said that nearly 180 people were detained during the protests on December 13, with most of the arrests reported in Minsk.
According to local news outlet Nasha Niva, more than 120 marches took places across the country, with numbers at each rally ranging from dozens to several hundred.
Some protesters marched in outlying residential areas of Minsk, waving white-and-red flags, a symbol of the opposition, and chanting “Long live Belarus.”
The demonstrations came as opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya was scheduled to appear at events in Germany, as part of her efforts to rally international support for Belarus’s beleaguered opposition.
The country has been roiled by unprecedented political opposition since early August when Lukashenka was declared victor of a presidential election that opposition leaders said was flawed.
Activists have defied often violent police tactics and organized weeks of demonstrations and rallies.
Still, the only hints of concession that Lukashenka has shown are suggestions he has made about drafting a new constitution.
In contrast to past weekend demonstration, Minsk authorities did not shutter the subway system on December 13, and no major Internet disruptions were reported.
Read our coverage as Belarusians take to the streets to demand the resignation of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and call for new elections after official results from the August 9 presidential poll gave Lukashenka a landslide victory.
Many of Belarus’s opposition leaders have been arrested or forced to leave the country, including Tsikhanouskaya, who says she won the August election.
Tsikhanouskaya, who now lives in exile in neighboring Lithuania, hailed protesters who had gathered “despite repressions, violence and cold.
“They resist Lukashenka’s regime because the people of Belarus want to live in a democratic and free country,” she said in a post to Twitter.
The United States, the European Union, and several other countries have refused to acknowledge Lukashenka as the winner of the vote.
The European Union imposed sanctions on Lukashenka and his allies citing election rigging and a violent police crackdown.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Under President Shavkat Mirziyoev, who was elected on December 4, 2016, Uzbekistan has made some progress addressing the long list of rights violations that came to characterize the Uzbek government under Mirziyoev’s predecessor, Islam Karimov. But how much?
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The ethnically based entities that make up Bosnia-Herzegovina are choosing separate paths to vaccinate their populations, a large segment of which doesn’t appear to trust the science anyway.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Azerbaijani defense officials say four soldiers were killed amid an outbreak of fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, the worst since a cease-fire last month ended large-scale clashes.
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Armenia has accused Baku of violating a cease-fire agreement in the conflict over Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Armenia’s Defense Ministry said Azerbaijani forces attacked positions held by ethnic Armenian forces, the so-called Karabakh Defense Army, in Nagorno-Karabakh in the southern Hadrut district on December 12.
Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry issued a statement accusing the Armenian military of staging a “provocation” and insisted that the cease-fire agreement was holding.
Karabakh Defense Army officials said three of its fighters were wounded in clashes on December 11.
Russian peacekeepers monitoring the cease-fire agreement acknowledged violations in Hadrut on both days, but did not assign blame.
“Small-arms shooting was recorded in the Hadrut district,” a spokesman for the peacekeeping force told journalists. “Through direct communications lines, the sides were promptly informed of our demand to completely observe the cease-fire regime.”
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said the December 11 incident was a “terrorist attack” committed by “either Armenian gunmen or what is left of the Armenian Army” in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nagorno-Karabakh belongs to Azerbaijan, but it and some surrounding areas have been de facto controlled by Armenia-backed ethnic Armenian forces for decades. In September, Azerbaijan launched a military campaign that enabled Baku to regain control of large parts of the territory.
In November, a Russia-brokered cease-fire agreement was reached, and some 2,000 Russian peacekeeping forces have been deployed to the conflict zone.
Peace talks on the conflict have been coordinated by the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). French co-Chairman Stephane Visconti said in Baku on December 12 that Minsk Group mediators were ready to continue working toward a long-term settlement.
“We are ready to work on your proposals and look for an acceptable option for the sides,” Visconti told Aliyev.
Visconti added that the recent developments had produced “an absolutely new situation” in the region, “which could bring about stability.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned Turkey’s ambassador on December 11 to protest remarks by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a visit to Azerbaijan.
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The Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner is raising alarm about a humanitarian crisis unfolding in northwestern Bosnia where up to 3,500 migrants may end up sleeping rough in cold weather.
Dunja Mijatovic said in a letter to Bosnian officials on December 11 that a lack of action and coordination between the country’s various governments risks having grave consequences for migrants and asylum seekers left without housing, food, and medical care.
There are up to 10,000 migrants in Bosnia now, a quarter of whom sleep rough in the woods, abandoned buildings, and by roadsides. Ethnically divided Bosnia, one of the poorest countries in Europe, has few resources to provide for them.
Mijatovic also called for fast-track procedures for asylum-seekers, an end to anti-migrant rhetoric, and more comprehensive care to be provided for nearly 500 unaccompanied migrant children in Bosnia, including access to education.
Bosnia has become a transit route for migrants and refugees from Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa since European Union countries shut their borders to new arrivals in 2015. Many have made their way to Bosnia’s northwest hoping to cross into EU member Croatia to the west.
In October, the authorities in the northwestern town of Bihac closed its biggest migrant center and moved hundreds of people to the already full Lipa camp some 75 kilometers away.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), which oversees all migrant facilities in Bosnia, on December 11 stopped funding the Lipa camp because the authorities have failed to ensure the necessary conditions to make it suitable for winter.
IOM head Peter Van der Auweraert told N1 local television that the government needed to provide an alternative center for some 1,500 people from the camp, otherwise they would have to join another 1,500 people already sleeping rough.
The EU has provided Bosnia with 60 million euros ($70 million) in emergency funding, mostly for migrant centers.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner is raising alarm about a humanitarian crisis unfolding in northwestern Bosnia where up to 3,500 migrants may end up sleeping rough in cold weather.
Dunja Mijatovic said in a letter to Bosnian officials on December 11 that a lack of action and coordination between the country’s various governments risks having grave consequences for migrants and asylum seekers left without housing, food, and medical care.
There are up to 10,000 migrants in Bosnia now, a quarter of whom sleep rough in the woods, abandoned buildings, and by roadsides. Ethnically divided Bosnia, one of the poorest countries in Europe, has few resources to provide for them.
Mijatovic also called for fast-track procedures for asylum-seekers, an end to anti-migrant rhetoric, and more comprehensive care to be provided for nearly 500 unaccompanied migrant children in Bosnia, including access to education.
Bosnia has become a transit route for migrants and refugees from Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa since European Union countries shut their borders to new arrivals in 2015. Many have made their way to Bosnia’s northwest hoping to cross into EU member Croatia to the west.
In October, the authorities in the northwestern town of Bihac closed its biggest migrant center and moved hundreds of people to the already full Lipa camp some 75 kilometers away.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), which oversees all migrant facilities in Bosnia, on December 11 stopped funding the Lipa camp because the authorities have failed to ensure the necessary conditions to make it suitable for winter.
IOM head Peter Van der Auweraert told N1 local television that the government needed to provide an alternative center for some 1,500 people from the camp, otherwise they would have to join another 1,500 people already sleeping rough.
The EU has provided Bosnia with 60 million euros ($70 million) in emergency funding, mostly for migrant centers.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Work has resumed in Baltic Sea waters off the German coast on the controversial Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline, project managers said in a statement on December 11.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The Kremlin issued a strenuous nondenial of a report linking lucrative sweetheart deals to President Vladimir Putin’s purported former son-in-law, drawing comparisons with a decade he disdains. A top-secret “doomsday plane” was stripped of equipment by thieves. And new sanctions underscored the cost, in terms of image at least, of Putin’s reliance on Ramzan Kadyrov.
Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.
State Of Dismissal
The Kremlin has become practiced in issuing nondenial denials over the years under President Vladimir Putin — and it got some more practice this past week.
First, there was the report that Russian businessman Kirill Shamalov received a slew of offers to buy stakes in some of the country’s biggest companies shortly after marrying Putin’s younger daughter in 2013 — and did consummate at least one sweetheart deal, receiving a stake worth an estimated $380 million in a Russian petrochemicals company for $100.
The December 7 report was the product of an investigation by Russian outlet iStories, and was published in collaboration with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). It used leaked e-mails to “shine new light on the closed circle of family and associates who surround the Russian president,” as The Guardian put it.
The Kremlin has done a fair amount to prevent such light from being shed. For example, Putin has acknowledged that he has two daughters but has never publicly confirmed reports revealing their identity — and by extension, he has not acknowledged that Shamalov is his former son-in-law.
In any case, and as is often the case, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the iStories/OCCRP report but did not directly deny it.
In remarks quoted by state news agency TASS, he suggested it was part of a disinformation campaign involving “various rumors, often having nothing to do with reality.”
Peskov’s remarks seemed intended to discredit any future reports alleging dubious deals or wrongdoing by Putin and those close to him: “We know, more or less, who is the organizer of this activity, and we know that this work will continue.”
Office Double?
The following day, Peskov dismissed a more bizarre report, this one saying that that the Kremlin has built an office for Putin in Sochi that is identical to his office outside Moscow, and that Putin has frequently — and secretly — worked in the Black Sea resort city at times in recent months.
“It turns out that we don’t know where Putin has been located” in recent weeks or months, the December 8 report by the online publication Proyekt Media said, citing unnamed sources it said were familiar with his schedule as well as analysis of flight-tracking records.
One claim that Peskov did deny was that Putin is having serious health problems. In remarks on December 8, he cast that assertion as part of the same alleged “information exercise” that produced the report about Shamalov but was less equivocal, saying: “As regards [Putin’s] health, that is complete nonsense.”
In remarks to another online Russian news outlet, Peskov called the report “the latest stupidity” but stopped short of a direct denial. He said Putin had been working in the Moscow area and taking trips for work at times, but did not give dates or mention whether he had been in Sochi recently.
Putin, 67, secured the right to run for a fifth presidential term in 2024 and a sixth term in 2030 by pushing though constitutional changes earlier this year.
The late Russian President Boris Yeltsin (left) smiles as he talks to Vladimir Putin, the day he named his prime minister acting president.
He rose to power in 1999, when President Boris Yeltsin named him prime minister in August and then resigned on New Year’s Eve, making him acting president.
Putin, whose first two terms coincided with an oil-fueled economic boom, has frequently taken aim at the decade before he entered the Kremlin, portraying the 1900s as a modern-day time of troubles in which Russia came close to ceasing to exist in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Allies have cast him as a savior who raised the country off its knees, while detractors say problems like corruption have only gotten worse, not to speak of democracy and human rights.
Doomsday Scenario?
For those who argue that Russia took a big wrong turn in the 1990s, one event that stands out is “loans-for-shares” — the controversial auctions, launched 25 years ago, in which leading businessmen bought stakes in top state enterprises at low prices. Putin’s supporters praise him for reining in some of the tycoons who increased their wealth and power in such deals.
But for critics of the Kremlin, Shamalov’s reported windfall – as well as numerous investigations published by other groups, including opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation – bolster suspicions that corruption and connections are a major part of Putin’s ruling apparatus.
An entirely different occurrence this week evoked memories of the 1990s, when the theft of copper wire, railroad tracks, and other scraps of Soviet-era infrastructure that could be sold for cash was the stuff of frequent news reports — while more alarming reports stemmed from the theft and smuggling of radioactive materials.
On December 9, the Rostov regional branch of the Interior Ministry said that more than 1 million rubles ($13,600) worth of equipment was stolen from an Ilyushin Il-80 — an aircraft dubbed the “doomsday plane” that was designed to shield top officials from the effects of a nuclear explosion — at a military airfield in the southern city of Taganrog.
Russian media earlier reported that thieves broke into the aircraft, described as a highly classified military plane, and stole electronic equipment including radio boards. Military experts say the plane is one of four Il-80s designed to be used as airborne command posts for the Russian president and other top officials in the event of a nuclear conflict.
Peskov described the theft as an “emergency situation” and said that “measures will be taken to prevent this from happening again.”
‘Egregious Activities’
Putin is also credited, including by Putin, for the lower level of violence in the North Caucasus today compared to the 1990s: Two separatist wars wracked Chechnya from 1994 to 2001, killing tens of thousands of people and fueling an Islamist insurgency in that province and other regions nearby.
Since 2007, when he appointed Ramzan Kadyrov to head Chechnya, Putin has relied on a figure reviled by human rights activists to maintain control over the region.
The price of that trade-off, at least in terms of Putin’s image in the West, was underscored when the United States imposed additional sanctions on Kadyrov and announced punitive measures targeting five individuals and six Russia-registered legal entities with close ties to him, including a soccer team based in Chechnya, Akhmat Grozny.
Vladimir Putin with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov (right) in 2011.
Since sanctions were initially imposed on Kadyrov in 2017, forces under his guidance continued “egregious activities” including “kidnapping, torturing, and killing members of the LGBTI population” in Chechnya, the U.S. Treasury Department said, adding that these forces “are accused of illegal abductions, torture, extrajudicial executions, and other abuses, including the detention of journalists and activists.”
The new sanctions were imposed under the so-called Global Magnitsky Act, a 2016 law that authorizes the U.S. government to seek to punish suspected human rights offenders around the world by freezing any assets in the United States and banning them from entering the country.
The law is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a whistle-blower who was jailed in Moscow, exposed the alleged theft of $230 million from Russian state coffers by a group of state officials. Denied adequate medical treatment and subjected to conditions rights groups said amounted to torture, he died in custody in November 2009, almost a decade after the start of the Putin era.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
BISHKEK — Kyrgyzstan’s Foreign Ministry appears to be trying to calm simmering tensions with the United States after a senior official criticized the top U.S. diplomat in Bishkek for his statements on the Central Asian nation’s problems with corruption.
About a dozen activists gathered in front of the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek on December 11 in support of U.S. Ambassador Donald Lu after the deputy chairman of the Kyrgyz parliament, Mirlan Bakirov, accused the U.S. diplomat of “meddling in Kyrgyzstan’s internal affairs” because of his statements regarding disputed parliamentary elections in October and the arrest of Raimbek Matraimov, a wealthy and influential political player in the Central Asian nation.
Bakirov’s comments came after the U.S. Treasury Department announced on December 9 that it had slapped sanctions on Matraimov for his role in a vast corruption and money-laundering scheme that saw hundreds of millions of dollars funneled out of the country.
Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry spokesman Nurlan Suerkulov said on December 11 that “Kyrgyzstan is ready to closely work along with the United States and other countries against corruption.”
“The Kyrgyz side is grateful to the U.S. for its goodwill and proposal to cooperate in that direction…. Along with that, we think that such cooperation, as any other ties, must be carried out in frames of current legal norms and principles of interstate relations, one of which is noninterference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state,” Suerkulov added.
On December 5, Lu criticized proven cases of vote buying during controversial October 4 parliamentary elections that led to mass protests which ousted the government, led to the resignation of President Sooronbai Jeenbekov, and caused a deep political crisis in the country.
“This has been like a Hollywood mafia movie. But you don’t yet know how the movie will end,” he said of the situation, adding that while the government has taken some steps in the battle against graft, “they are not enough.”
The sanctions against Matraimov fall under the Magnitsky Act, a piece of legislation passed by the United States in 2012 that penalizes individuals responsible for committing human rights violations or acts of significant corruption.
Last year, a joint investigation by RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), and the Kyrgyz news site Kloop, implicated Matraimov in a corruption scheme involving the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars out of Kyrgyzstan by Chinese-born Uyghur businessman Aierken Saimaiti, who was assassinated in Istanbul in November 2019.
Matraimov is one of three brothers from what is rumored to be one of the wealthiest and most-powerful families in Kyrgyzstan.
He was a key financial backer for political parties and presidents, including Jeenbekov and the Mekenim Kyrgyzstan party, which dominated the controversial October 4 parliamentary elections along with a party called Birimdik, which listed Jeenbekov’s brother among its ranks.
The $700 million scheme involved a company controlled by Matraimov bribing officials to skirt around customs fees and regulations, as well as engaging in money laundering, “allowing for maximum profits,” the U.S. Treasury Department said.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a December 10 tweet said sanctions had also been imposed against Matraimov’s wife, Uulkan Turgunova.
Records leaked from the Turkish investigation into Saimaiti’s killing showed that he had named Matraimov as one of two people who would be responsible should something happen to him, according to a subsequent report by RFE/RL.
The other individual was Khabibula Abdukadyr — a Chinese-born Uyghur cargo magnate with a Kazakh passport for whom Saimaiti said he had laundered money.
Kyrgyz authorities said in October, following Matraimov’s arrest, that the tycoon had agreed to pay about 2 billion soms ($23.5) million in damages to the state, and that 80 million soms (almost $1 million) had been transferred to its account.
Matraimov and his family have denied any links to Saimaiti or corruption in the Kyrgyz customs service, and filed a libel suit over the investigation, demanding hundreds of millions of dollars from RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service, known locally as Radio Azattyk, its former correspondent Ali Toktakunov, Kloop, and the 24.kg online newspaper as compensation for the alleged damages.
The hearing into the lawsuit was scheduled to resume on December 11 but because Judge Jyldyz Ismailova did not show up, the hearing was postponed to an unspecified time.
Toktakunov, who has received death threats in connection with the reporting, which has triggered street protests in Kyrgyzstan following its publication last year, said to RFE/RL on December 11 that since Matraimov accepted responsibility and agreed to compensate the financial damage to the state treasury, the lawsuit he filed must be withdrawn.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Well-known Afghan writer and media activist Rahnaward Zaryab has died from COVID-19 at a hospital in Kabul. He was 76.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
MOSCOW — Photographer Boris Antonov doesn’t remember exactly how he found out that former Beatle John Lennon had been shot to death in New York on December 8, 1980.
It definitely wasn’t from the Soviet media, he recalled. In his personal archive, Antonov still has a tiny clipping from a back page of the Soviet daily Trud that announced the news in three terse sentences on December 10.
But word of Lennon’s killing “spread rather quickly” among his friends, Antonov told RFE/RL.
“It was a shock, of course,” Antonov, who at the time was a student at the Moscow Communications Institute, said. “Because the Beatles seemed to be eternal. They had been there our whole lives.”
The tiny Soviet press clipping that Boris Antonov saw announcing John Lennon’s death in December 1980.
Antonov stressed that he was an ordinary Soviet kid from the outlying Moscow neighborhood of Kuntsevo.
“No one in my circle had dissident views or any doubts about socialism,” he said. “Downtown was where the kids lived whose fathers were in cinema or were diplomats or professors. The so-called Golden Youth who had blue jeans and the latest Deep Purple album.”
Antonov did, however, play bass in a neighborhood band. He remembers hearing the Beatles’ 1965 song Girl when he was in the seventh grade on a Soviet compilation album called Musical Kaleidoscope No. 8.
And there were rare glimpses of the English rockers even on Soviet television.
“There was a television show called America In The Viewfinder that began with a clip from Can’t Buy Me Love,” Antonov remembered. “The show was about how hard life was for American workers. But we didn’t care about that. The main thing for us was those 20 seconds of the Beatles.”
A young Boris Antonov plays guitar with a bandmate and a poster of Lenin in the background.
One time, he said, he was in a record store when the clerk decided to show off to his friends by playing the 1969 hit Come Together.
“That was a shock,” he said, recalling how Lennon’s vocals stood out compared to the Soviet pop stars that dominated the airwaves at the time. “We were surrounded by [Iosif] Kobzon, Aida Vedishcheva, Valentina Tolkkunova….”
In the late 1970s, and especially as the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games approached, the atmosphere became more relaxed. In 1977, the Soviet record label Melodia released Lennon’s 1971 album Imagine.
On December 20, 1980, Antonov saw a small notice on a bulletin board at the Moscow Communications Institute. It invited “all admirers and fans of the music of the Beatles” to come “tomorrow” to the Lenin Hills overlook near the main building of Moscow State University (MGU) at 11 a.m. for a gathering of “those who want to honor the memory of John Lennon.”
The small notice that Antonov found on a bulletin board at the Moscow Communications Institute
Across the bottom of the announcement, someone had written: “Those who are afraid of repressions please don’t come.”
“It was evening, and I was putting on my coat to leave,” Antonov told RFE/RL. “That’s when I saw it. I wanted to take it because it was such a nice thing. I argued a little with myself — maybe I should let more people find out about it. But it was already late, and the institute was about to close. I thought I wouldn’t harm freedom or Lennon’s memory, so I carefully took it down and hid it away.”
Antonov said he worried a bit about the possibility of trouble if he participated in the memorial, but that “just made it more interesting, with a little risk and fear.”
“Of course, we weren’t worried that they would beat us or arrest us, but we knew that there could be trouble,” he added, including the possibility of being expelled from the institute.
That evening, a friend was celebrating his birthday with a listening of the Pink Floyd album The Wall. Antonov told them about the Lennon gathering, but none of them wanted to go.
“They were simply afraid,” he said.
Already a budding photographer, Antonov loaded a fresh roll of film in his camera the next morning and headed to the Lenin Hills overlook, a prominent platform with a panoramic view over the Soviet capital. As it turned out, Antonov took almost all of the surviving photographs of the event.
When he arrived at about 11:30, there were “200-300 people gathered near the famous granite barrier.” Two people were holding a banner reading “To The Blessed Memory Of John Lennon.” Another young man, apparently a student, had a sign around his neck with the word “Imagine” and the third verse of Lennon’s iconic song of that title written on it.
In a memoir written for the website Beatles.ru, Antonov said he saw a young man take off his hat and give a moving, heartfelt tribute to Lennon in a voice breaking with sorrow.
“He spoke of Lennon as a great musician and as a fighter for social justice,” Antonov wrote. “For the rights of blacks, for peace. He concluded with the words, ‘Together with Lennon forever!’”
Others stepped up and concluded their speeches with similar slogans that had Soviet echoes: “Lennon hasn’t died!” or “Lennon forever!”
“One young man shouted, ‘Give peace a chance!’ and threw up a peace sign,” Antonov wrote.
Antonov said he doesn’t recall any particular anti-Soviet sentiment at the event. He said a single police officer stood nearby and watched. One or two photographers from the international press snapped photos. An article later appeared in London’s The Daily Telegraph.
A police officer stands by as Beatles fans mourn John Lennon in December 1980.
Nonetheless, participants began being detained as the demonstration was breaking up and people were heading to the nearest metro station.
“The police and, according to rumors, government collaborators from MGU, began to push the loudest participants around and shove them toward a bus,” Antonov wrote in his memoir. “People couldn’t believe their eyes. No one had any experience of anything like that. One guy asked a police officer to explain what was happening and began citing various rights and freedoms from the constitution…. The crowd started getting angry. You could hear people shouting some bold things at the police and particularly at the security officers in plain clothes who had until that moment been standing around pretending to be [Lennon] fans and who were now ushering activists into the bus.”
Antonov said the crowd linked arms and continued walking toward the metro. As they passed the bus with the detainees, Antonov said he shouted, “Guys, we are with you!”
Altogether, a few hundred Beatles fans gathered in the Soviet capital to mark Lennon’s death.
For Antonov, the breaking point came when a police officer tried to detain the young man who had earlier been quoting the constitution.
“‘We won’t give him up!’” Antonov recalled saying. At that point, the police grabbed him too. Antonov said he instinctively resisted, kicking out with his legs after both his arms were restrained.
“But, of course, it was pointless,” he said. “They kicked me into the bus.”
“We somehow felt that right was on our side,” Antonov recalled. “We knew that we were innocent and that our cause was just.”
The crowd was even angrier, he said, because most of those who were detaining them were MGU student collaborators and informers.
The detainees were taken to various police stations for questioning. Antonov said none of the officers was rude to him. One of them even said that he liked the Beatles himself.
Antonov said he later heard that some of the detainees had various problems, including being disciplined at their institutes.
“But none of the people I knew personally had any such problems,” he told RFE/RL.
A year later, in December 1981, Soviet Lennon fans tried to organize another, similar event on the first anniversary of the tragedy. But this time the Soviet authorities were prepared.
Antonov and a couple of friends tried to approach the Lenin Hills overlook.
“We were grabbed when we were still 300 or 400 meters from the viewing point,” he recalled. “The police came up to us and said, ‘Boys, where are you going?’ ‘Just taking a walk,’ we answered. ‘Well, take a walk with us then.’”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The United States has imposed another set of sanctions targeting Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Russia’s North Caucasus region of Chechnya and a loyal supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
NUR-SULTAN — Kazakhstan has kicked off its parliamentary election campaign with five parties — none of which is running on an opposition platform.
The Central Election Commission (OSK) said on December 10 that the campaign started at 6 p.m. local time and will run until midnight on January 9, the day before the elections to parliament’s lower chamber, the Mazhilis.
Along with the ruling Nur-Otan party, four other political parties loyal to the government — Aq Zhol (Bright Path), Adal (Honest), Auyl (Village), and the Communist People’s Party — will take part in the election, the OSK said.
It added that the terms for debates between the parties will be decided by December 30, while voter preference polls can be conducted only by pollsters that have at least five years of experience and have given preliminary notice to the OSK.
OSK Chairman Berik Imashev on December 10 brushed off criticism by civil rights organizations and unregistered opposition groups over a recent OSK resolution banning nongovernmental organizations whose charters do not envision such activities.
The resolution also banned online live video coverage from polling stations and introduced restrictions for taking pictures at them.
Civil rights activists have said that they will appeal the OSK’s moves in court.
The vote will decide 98 of 107 seats in the Mazhilis. Nine other seats will be separately elected by the Assembly of People of Kazakhstan — a political body representing dozens of ethnic groups of the Central Asian nation.
The only officially registered political party that calls itself opposition, the All-National Social Democratic Party, is boycotting the elections.
OSDP leader Askhat Rakhimzhanov said that his party decided on November 27 not to participate in the elections because Kazakhstan’s political landscape continues to be dominated by the “same” political elite.
Since 2019, several other political groups and parties have tried to register in order to be eligible to take part in the poll, but Kazakh authorities have rejected all of their applications.
None of the elections in Kazakhstan since it gained independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been considered by Western observers as fair and free.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Viktor Kozlov used to drive a tractor on a Soviet-era state farm, but when times got tough, he moved to the coal-rich Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk and started selling coal to residents there to heat their homes. Most of his customers are poor and he sells coal on credit to keep them warm through the bitter winter.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Azerbaijan has held a military parade to mark the country’s declared victory over Armenia in a recent war over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region that ended with a Moscow-brokered truce that handed back several parts of the region to Baku.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and visiting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a key ally in the conflict, presided over the parade devoted to what is officially described in Azerbaijan as the Victory in the Patriotic War, held at Baku’s central Azadliq (Liberty) Square, on December 10.
The peace agreement took force exactly a month ago and put an end to six weeks of fierce fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh that left thousands dead on both sides. It was seen as a major victory in Azerbaijan, while prompting mass protests in Armenia, where opposition supporters are demanding the ouster of the prime minister over his handling of the conflict.
Azerbaijan’s win was also an important geopolitical coup for Erdogan, helping solidify Turkey’s role as a powerbroker in the ex-Soviet Caucasus region that the Kremlin considers its sphere of influence.
More than 3,000 military personnel and some 150 pieces of military hardware — including some military equipment captured from ethnic Armenian forces during the war — were part of the procession, while navy vessels performed maneuvers in the nearby Bay of Baku. Turkish military personnel also participated in the event.
Under the peace deal, some parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and all seven districts around it were placed under Azerbaijani administration after almost 30 years of control by ethnic Armenian forces.
After the truce, Turkey signed a memorandum with Russia to create a joint monitoring center in Azerbaijan.
Russian officials have said that Ankara’s involvement will be limited to the work of the monitoring center on Azerbaijani soil, and Turkish peacekeepers would not enter Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but the ethnic Armenians who make up most of the region’s population reject Azerbaijani rule.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
International human rights groups are urging both Azerbaijan and Armenia to urgently conduct investigations into war crimes allegedly committed by both sides during weeks of recent fighting over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Amnesty International has analyzed 22 videos depicting “extrajudicial executions, the mistreatment of prisoners of war and other captives, and desecration of the dead bodies of enemy soldiers,” the London-based human rights watchdog said in a statement on December 10.
Two of the clips show “extrajudicial executions by decapitation” by members of Azerbaijan’s military while another video shows the cutting of an Azerbaijani border guard’s throat that led to his death, it said.
“The depravity and lack of humanity captured in these videos shows the deliberate intention to cause ultimate harm and humiliation to victims, in clear violation of international humanitarian law,” according to Denis Krivosheyev, the rights group’s research director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
“Both Azerbaijani and Armenian authorities must immediately conduct independent, impartial investigations and identify all those responsible,” Krivosheyev said.
Louis Charbonneau, the United Nations director at New-York based Human Rights Watch, said the abuses described by Amnesty were “war crimes” that should be investigated.
“Azerbaijan and Armenia authorities [should] investigate, identify [people] responsible & hold them accountable,” Charbonneau said on Twitter.
Amnesty International “authenticated the footage as genuine, and technical tests conducted on the videos indicate that the files have not been manipulated,” the statement said, adding that a forensic pathologist verified the details of the injuries.
International humanitarian law prohibits acts of violence against prisoners of war and any other detained person, the mutilation of dead bodies, and the filming of confessions or denunciations for propaganda purposes.
Amnesty International’s call comes one month after a Moscow-brokered cease-fire deal brought an end to six weeks of fighting in and around Nagorno-Karabakh — the worst clashes over the disputed region in three decades.
The latest fighting left more than 5,000 people dead, including many civilians, and resulted in Azerbaijani forces retaking much of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding districts.
Both sides have accused each other of violating international law during the war.
The region, populated mainly by ethnic Armenians, declared independence from Azerbaijan amid a 1988-94 war that claimed an estimated 30,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
Internationally mediated negotiations have failed to result in a resolution.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Iran and Afghanistan have officially inaugurated their first railway link, an achievement the two countries’ presidents said would help enhance trade across the region.
The 130-kilometer line running from Khaf in northeastern Iran into Rosnak in the western Afghan province of Herat is seen as providing a crucial transport link for the landlocked country where decades of war have hindered infrastructure development.
The link is to be eventually expanded by 85 kilometers to reach the city of Herat.
The $75 million Khaf-Herat railway project began in 2007, with Tehran funding construction on both sides of the border.
Speaking during the inauguration ceremony, held via videoconference due to the coronavirus pandemic, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said the project was important not only for Afghanistan and Iran but also for the entire region.
Iran’s President Hassan Rohani said it was “one of the historic days” in relations between the two neighbors.
The ceremony saw cargo trains depart from opposite ends of the line, a week after a shipment of cement was sent from Iran to Afghanistan by train, inaugurating the railway link project.
Iran seeks to become a regional transport hub, allowing Afghanistan and other landlocked countries in the region to ship goods to its ports on the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
When CC Metals & Alloys (CCMA) halted operations in July, some workers at the 70-year-old plant in western Kentucky expected to be back on the job by the New Year.
After all, the factory — which produces an alloy of iron and silicon for the boom-and-bust steel industry — has cut output and laid off employees during tough times over the decades, only to fire up idled furnaces and call workers back after a few months.
So for some employees of the plant owned by Ukrainian tycoon Ihor Kolomoyskiy and his business partner Hennadiy Boholyubov, it came as a shock when union leaders at CCMA informed them last month that most of the remaining workers would be laid off in December — even as the ferroalloy market shows signs of rebounding from a sharp COVID-19 slump.
“Most of the people that have been laid off in July ain’t even been looking for a job” because they assumed they would be back at the plant soon, one worker told RFE/RL by telephone, speaking on condition of anonymity because the new job cuts have not been publicly announced.
The clouded future of CCMA and its workers is another twist in the more than 10-year-old story of Kolomoyskiy’s business activities in the United States, where he and Boholyubov built a steel business worth hundreds of millions of dollars but lost it by 2017.
Word of the additional layoffs came months after the U.S. Justice Department accused Kolomoyskiy and Boholyubov of purchasing U.S. real estate and businesses with money embezzled from their Kyiv-based bank in 2008-16.
Ihor Kolomoyskiy is one of the richest and most influential magnates in Ukraine, where his assets include ferroalloy plants, energy producers, and media companies.
The allegation, which the two tycoons deny, stems from a continuing investigation by the FBI — a division of the Justice Department — into suspicions of money-laundering.
The current shutdown may be unprecedented, Stan Burkeen, a retired CCMA employee and union president whose father began working at the plant shortly after it opened in 1949 along the Tennessee River in Calvert City, Kentucky, told RFE/RL.
Boom And Bust
“It has always operated. Even when the price of metal was low, it would still run. They just might shut off one or two furnaces until the price went back up. But I have never known them to shut every line down,” said Burkeen, who retired in 2018 after a quarter-century on the job.
It has always operated. Even when the price of metal was low, it would still run. They just might shut off one or two furnaces until the price went back up. But I have never known them to shut every line down.
Now, the only thing buzzing on CCMA’s sprawling grounds is a Bitcoin-mining operation, employees say — a warehouse full of computers that are churning out cryptocurrency while the factory’s traditional production is idled.
When that might be restarted is unclear, current and former employees say, in part because the temporary collapse in ferroalloy demand prompted by the pandemic is not the only cloud hanging over CCMA.
Some workers suspect that the law enforcement pressure faced by Kolomoyskiy and two Miami-based U.S. associates who run CCMA, Mordechai Korf and Uriel Laber, may be the main reason for the apparent lack of plans to restart the plant. Financial problems at Kolomoyskiy’s other U.S. companies could potentially support such speculation.
“They are going to lay off more people and that is all we know,” the worker who spoke on condition of anonymity told RFE/RL on December 2. “The plant management don’t even know nothing. Miami is just keeping everything hush-hush.”
On August 4, the FBI raided the associates’ Miami headquarters and their real-estate management office in Cleveland, Ohio, where they own several properties.
Two days later, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit accusing Kolomoyskiy and Boholyubov of purchasing U.S. assets with money “misappropriated” from Kyiv-based PrivatBank, which was the tycoon’s main investment vehicle until it was nationalized in 2016.
The Justice Department claims the tycoons were assisted in these alleged actions by Korf and Laber, who oversee all their U.S. assets.
A spokesman for Korf and Laber declined to comment on any plans for layoffs at CCMA or other aspects of the plant’s future, including its sale.
Top Tycoon
Kolomoyskiy He has ties to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and returned from self-imposed exile shortly after Zelenskiy’s election in 2019.
The U.S. Justice Department claims that Kolomoyskiy and Boholyubov fraudulently loaned themselves money from PrivatBank in 2008-16 and laundered it through shell companies before purchasing U.S. assets with the help of Korf and Laber.
The tycoons deny the accusations and claim they purchased the U.S. assets with about $2 billion they received from the sale of their Ukrainian steel business in the late 2000s. Korf and Laber also deny any wrongdoing.
The lawsuit filed by the Justice Department in August is seeking the forfeiture of two commercial buildings – one in Kentucky and one in Texas — that the tycoons purchased during their years-long U.S. buying spree.
Those proceedings have been delayed a few weeks as Korf, the 48-year-old CEO of CCMA and the real-estate assets, suffered an apparent seizure on November 16, according to court filings and Miami Beach Fire Department records obtained by RFE/RL.
The FBI is still conducting its investigation into the Ukrainian tycoons and their two U.S. associates, Special Agent Vicki Anderson-Gregg told RFE/RL on December 2. She declined to comment on whether law enforcement was looking into details about the purchase of CCMA.
Kolomoyskiy and Boholyubov bought CCMA for about $188 million in March 2011, when ferroalloy prices were near record highs.
Alloys To Crypto
CCMA is one of only three U.S. plants producing ferrosilicon, an alloy of iron and silicon that is mainly used in the production of steel to enhance its strength. The company’s three furnaces have an installed capacity of 100,000 metric tons.
The plant last year produced an estimated 70,000 tons, accounting for roughly 40 percent of U.S. ferrosilicon production and 20 percent of U.S. consumption, according to Kevin Fowkes, an industry expert at AlloyConsult.
CCMA had largely been a profitable business over the past several decades, current and former employees told RFE/RL, though it has faced production slowdowns and layoffs from time to time, most recently in 2015.
Current and former workers say they believe the Ukrainian tycoons mismanaged the plant by changing its business model and trying to run it from Miami rather than locally, as the previous owners had done.
Several years ago, the company shut the smallest of the three furnaces, which produced specialty alloys, the workers said. As a result, the plant began almost exclusively making the most standard ferrosilicon product.
“From my experience, that plant can’t make it on just that one product alone,” said Burkeen, who also alleged that the company “hasn’t run as smoothly” as it did before the tycoons bought it. However, industry analysts say U.S. demand for specialty alloys has been hurt in recent years by steel-plant closures, suggesting a possible practical reason for the decision.
Meanwhile, the owners turned to a new source of revenue to offset the weak alloy market — cryptocurrency. A few years ago, the warehouse that had stored the specialty alloys was revamped and filled with hundreds if not thousands of computers to mine cryptocurrency, current and former employees say.
“They were bringing [computers] in by the truckload,” an employee of the plant told RFE/RL on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak about plant activities.
There are about 170 families, give or take, that depend on that place and that is not mentioning the truck-driving families and the warehouse people. It is a very important source of jobs in this area.
The cryptocurrency operation is run independently of the plant and has not been affected by the shutdown, the workers said.
A spokesperson for Korf and Laber told RFE/RL in July that CCMA invited a third party to host a data center on its property focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain as a way to diversify profits. The spokesperson did not disclose the third party nor the financial details of the hosting agreement.
“Both AI and blockchain are energy-intensive industries and are expected to grow exponentially to a $20 billion market in the next decade. Based on the success of the initial pilot program we may increase this business line. Having multiple revenue streams is prudent for CCMA,” the spokesperson said in a reply to RFE/RL.
Blockchain is a technology used to process cryptocurrency transactions.
The cryptocurrency data center on the grounds of CCMA is just one of at least five that have popped up in the Tennessee Valley in recent years thanks to the region’s abundant supply of cheap power. Cryptocurrency “mining” is an energy-intensive business and requires low pricing to be profitable.
170 Families
This year, as the coronavirus devastated the U.S. economy, CCMA announced in late June that it would shut all production and lay off more than 80 plant workers — about 77 percent of the workforce — on July 1 for an “unforeseeable period of time.”
The company said that the government shared blame for the shutdown, accusing it of allowing a flood of cheap imports that pushed prices lower.
Since reaching a low point in July, ferrosilicon prices have slowly risen over the past few months.
Amy Bennett, principal consultant at Fastmarkets, a metals industry pricing and news service, told the International Ferroalloys Conference on November 9 that she expected ferroalloy prices to pick up in 2021 as steel demand recovers from the pandemic.
The rosier outlook is leaving some workers questioning why CCMA is laying people off rather than calling them back. The long shutdown has fueled suspicions among workers and others in Calvert City that the tycoons may be seeking, for a second time, to sell the plant.
In 2017, Kolomoyskiy sought to sell CCMA to a Russian company in order to stave off the loss of his U.S. steel business, which filed for bankruptcy the previous year, an RFE/RL investigation showed.
But during a required interagency review, the Justice Department raised questions about where the proceeds would end up, people familiar with the issue told RFE/RL. The owners declined to answer those questions, they said, and the deal was never approved.
If the Ukrainian tycoons are aiming to sell, Burkeen said he hopes that the U.S. government will allow it and that a new owner will restart production.
“There are about 170 families, give or take, that depend on that place and that is not mentioning the truck-driving families and the warehouse people. It is a very important source of jobs in this area,” he said.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
MINSK — Belarus will close several land-border crossings as of December 20 due to the coronavirus pandemic, a move that will limit the movement of people at a time when the country is being rocked by protests over authoritarian Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s claim of victory in a disputed presidential election.
The national Internet portal for legal information on December 10 published a government resolution adopted earlier in the week, saying the measures, which include a ban on Belarusians travelling unless their trip is related to work or study, will take force 10 days after publication of the notice.
It is not clear how long the restrictions will be in place.
Belarus has since been hit by near-daily protests demanding Lukashenka resign, the release of all political prisoners, and a new election.
Security forces have violently cracked down on the protest movement, with more than 27,000 detentions, according to the United Nations. There have also been credible reports of torture and ill-treatment, and several people have died.
Opposition leaders, who say the August 9 election was rigged, immediately accused Lukashenka of using the COVID-19 measures as an excuse to impose restrictions on the movements of activists.
“Lukashenka closes inner borders of #Belarus because of Covid. Let’s be honest: the dictator just terrorizes the country & violates human rights on [a] daily basis,” opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who says she won the presidential poll, wrote on Twitter on December 10.
“He didn’t care about covid before. Now repressed Belarusians cannot flee and seek asylum abroad.”
The resolution orders “temporarily suspending the crossing of the state border of the Republic of Belarus for departure from the Republic of Belarus of citizens of the Republic of Belarus, as well as foreigners who have a permit for permanent or temporary residence in the Republic of Belarus.”
Restrictions will apply at all road, railway, and river checkpoints along the country’s borders. The ban does not apply to people with diplomatic and service passports, members of official delegations, drivers of international road transportation units, crews of aircraft and ships, train crews, individuals on business trips and some other categories of people.
Departure from the country will be also allowed once every six months for Belarusian citizens who are permanent residents of foreign countries or need to leave the country due to illness or the death of a close relative abroad, as well as for educational, employment, or medical purposes.
According to the resolution, when entering the country, foreign nationals will have to present test results proving that they are not infected with the coronavirus.
Lukashenka, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, has denied the accusations of election fraud and refuses to negotiate with the opposition.
The United States and European Union have both rejected the election results and have imposed sanctions on Belarus, as well as Lukashenka, over the issue.
As of December 10, the number of registered coronavirus cases in Belarus was 152,453, including 1,230 deaths and 129,950 recovered patients.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) says thousands of Kyrgyz children with disabilities are “segregated” in the country’s residential institutions, where the New-York-based group says they can experience “neglect, inappropriate medical treatment, and discrimination.”
In a report published on December 10, which marks International Human Rights Day, HRW says children with disabilities are subject to “discriminatory government evaluations that often lead to segregation in special schools or at home.”
By ratifying the United Nations Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities (CRPD) in 2019, Kyrgyzstan has committed to allow children with disabilities to “study in mainstream schools in the communities where they live,” said Laura Mills, researcher at HRW and the report’s author.
“However, the government still needs to turn this pledge into a reality for children across the country,” where 3,000 children with disabilities remain in special institutions, she added.
The study, titled Insisting On Inclusion: Institutionalization And Barriers To Education For Children With Disabilities In Kyrgyzstan, documents how children are denied quality, inclusive education in which children with and without disabilities study together in mainstream schools.
HRW says it interviewed 111 people between October 2019 and July 2020, including children with disabilities, teachers, and staff at residential institutions and special schools, parents, and disability rights activists. The watchdog also visited six residential institutions and schools for children with disabilities in four regions.
It found that these institutions had “insufficient personnel,” resulting in “neglect or lack of individualized attention.”
Staff “regularly use psychotropic drugs or forced psychiatric hospitalization to control children’s behavior and punish them.”
Children in residential institutions and special schools receive “either a poor education or no education at all.”
Meanwhile, mainstream schools “often deny enrollment” to children who were recommended for special school or home education.
And children who live at home “encounter significant, discriminatory obstacles to their education” in these schools.
Parents of children with disabilities who receive education at home complained that teachers “come for very few hours and are often not trained in teaching a child with a disability.”
Kyrgyzstan has pledged to close or transform several residential special schools, but Mills said that the authorities first need to “begin dismantling the obstacles that exclude them from schools in their communities.”
“The government should ensure that children with disabilities study together with their peers and provide them with the tools they need to succeed.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is urging Iran to cease jailing members of the press for their work after a 72-year-old journalist began a three-year prison sentence over his coverage of protests last year.
“Jailing an elderly journalist in the middle of a raging pandemic shows how much contempt the Iranian judiciary has for the press,” CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour said in a statement on December 8, a day after authorities arrested Kayvan Samimi and took him to serve a three-year sentence at Tehran’s Evin prison.
Mansour said Samimi “must be released immediately and unconditionally, as should all of the journalists being held in Iran in retaliation for their reporting.”
Samimi was arrested in Tehran in May 2019 while he was covering labor protests for the Iran-e Farda magazine, where he worked as editor in chief.
He was freed on bail in June 2019 while facing charges of “colluding against national security” and “spreading antiestablishment propaganda.”
In April this year, a Tehran court tried Samimi in absentia, sentencing him to six years in prison.
Another court confirmed his conviction in May but reduced his sentence to three years, a decision that was upheld on further appeal in June.
Samimi previously served six years in prison over his coverage of the contested 2009 presidential election.
Since March, Iranian authorities have granted temporary release to tens of thousands of prisoners following concerns over the spread of the coronavirus in prisons in the Middle East’s worst-hit country. Many have since returned behind bars.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Prominent U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye says it has recently been targeted by hackers with “world-class capabilities,” believing that the hacking was state-sponsored.
In a blog post on December 8, FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia said the hackers broke into its network and stole tools used for testing customers’ security.
“The attacker primarily sought information related to certain government customers,” Mandia wrote, without naming them.
The blog post did not say when the attack was detected. It said the company is investigating the hack with the FBI.
Matt Gorham, assistant director of the FBI’s cyberdivision, said the hackers’ “high level of sophistication [was] consistent with a nation state.”
Cybersecurity experts say sophisticated nation-state hackers could modify the stolen “red team” tools and wield them in the future against government or industry targets.
Many in the cybersecurity community suspect Russia for the hack, including Jake Williams, president of cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec.
“I do think what we know of the operation is consistent with a Russian state actor,” Williams said. “Whether or not customer data was accessed, it’s still a big win for Russia.”
FireEye is a California-based firm used by companies and governments throughout the world to protect them from hacking.
The company has been at the forefront of investigating state-backed hacking groups and played a key role in identifying Russia as the protagonist in numerous hacks, including the attacks in 2015 and 2016 on Ukraine’s energy grid.
Mandia said he had concluded that “a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities” was behind the attack.
The attackers “tailored their world-class capabilities specifically to target and attack FireEye,” using “a novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past,” the blog said.
The hack was said to be the biggest blow to the U.S. cybersecurity community since hackers in 2016 released hacking tools stolen from the National Security Agency (NSA).
The United States believes Russia and North Korea capitalized on the stolen tools to unleash global cyberattacks.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) says it has suspended Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka and his son Viktar from all Olympic activities, including the Tokyo Olympic Games next year, and cut payments to the country’s National Olympic Committee (NOC) amid a violent crackdown against protesters following a disputed presidential election.
The IOC executive board made the decision on December 7, saying “the current NOC leadership has not appropriately protected the Belarusian athletes from political discrimination within the NOC, their member sports federations or the sports movement.”
“This is contrary to the fundamental principles of the Olympic Charter, and therefore seriously affects the reputation of the Olympic movement,” it said in a statement.
Lukashenka, who has led Belarus’s NOC for 23 years, claimed a sixth presidential term following an August 9 election that the opposition and the West say was rigged.
Belarus has since been hit by near-daily protests demanding Lukashenka resign, the release of all political prisoners, and a new election.
Security forces have violently cracked down on the protest movement, with more than 27,000 detentions, according to the UN. There have also been credible reports of torture and ill-treatment, and several people have died.
Meanwhile, much of the opposition leadership has been detained or forced into exile, and many Belarusian athletes have written to the IOC demanding urgent action, citing political discrimination and the imprisonment of sports figures by the authorities.
Lukashenka’s son Viktar, as the NOC’s first vice president, was also provisionally suspended by the IOC, along with NOC executive board member Dzmitry Baskau.
The IOC is also suspending “all financial payments” to the NOC, but will continue to help fund Belarusian athletes preparing for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, which were delayed to next year, and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing by paying scholarship money directly to them.
The moves do not affect Belarusian athletes’ right to compete as a recognized national team with their own flag and anthem, it noted.
However, the country’s status as co-host of the 2021 ice-hockey World Championships has come under threat, with the IOC saying it is looking into the issue.
IOC President Thomas Bach said after the organization’s board meeting that the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) would discuss Belarus’s host role in the days ahead.
Last month co-host Latvia blacklisted the head of Belarus’s ice hockey federation as the Baltic country seeks to prevent its neighbor from co-hosting the tournament.
The IIHF has also “initiated a procedure” against the Belarus official who sits on its ruling committee, Bach said.
Losing the tournament would be a further blow to Lukashenka, who has cultivated an image as a sportsman, regularly taking to the ice to play hockey, his favorite sporting pastime.
The continued crackdown on protests has caused international outrage, with the European Union and the United States slapping sanctions on Lukashenka and his son, as well as dozens of other top Belarusian officials.
The bloc is expected to pass a third round of sanctions next week.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Western sanctions have had an “outsized impact” on targeted Russian companies but may have actually strengthened President Vladimir Putin’s grip on the country’s tycoons, an economist and former State Department official says.
Russian corporations have lost almost $100 billion since sanctions were imposed in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea, an amount equivalent to about 4.2 percent of the country’s economy at the time, said Daniel Ahn, the chief U.S. economist at BNP Paribas and former deputy chief economist at the State Department.
Putin’s attempts to shield some of those companies from the sanctions through tax breaks, state contracts, and other methods increased the total impact of sanctions on the economy to 8 percent, a number that is larger than other studies, he said.
“So 8 percent is not anything to sneeze at. It is a big number,” said Ahn, speaking during a virtual conference on December 7 organized by the Kennan Institute.
Ahn co-authored a study on sanctions with Rodney Ludema, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington and the former chief economist at the State Department. The study was published last month in the European Economic Review.
Western sanctions against the Kremlin have been hotly debated in recent years, with some arguing that they have had little impact on the Russian economy or on Putin’s behavior, pointing to Moscow’s continued interference in Ukraine as an example. Others argue the sanctions have constrained Putin from undertaking even more aggressive action internationally and have weakened his domestic support.
There had been some hope that the sanctions would drive a wedge between Putin and the tycoons whose fortunes were damaged by them. Ahn said the opposite might have happened.
Putin used the state’s resources to deflect the impact on certain companies, especially those in the defense and technology sphere, making the tycoons even more dependent on the president.
“By controlling the ability of who to shield and who not to shield, the Russian regime has tightened and consolidated its hold over critical sectors of the economy,” he said.
Ahn told the conference his study of the impact of sanctions differs from those conducted by others, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), because he and Ludema focused on the effect on corporations — or the microeconomy — rather than the macroeconomy.
He said Russian companies dependent on Western imports for producing their goods or services had been much more impacted than companies exporting to the West.
“By denying key Western financial, legal, technological, and other services that may account for a relatively small amount of value added, but are actually critical for the operations of a company, we have had an outsized impact upon the Russian economy,” he said.
However, he said Russia had taken steps to insulate its economy, including from the Western financial system, and thus sanctions will have diminishing returns going forward.
Ahn said he was surprised to discover that U.S. sanctions have had a greater impact than European sanctions even though Russia’s economy is much more dependent on Europe.
He chalked that up to tougher enforcement by U.S. authorities of the sanctions regime, including fining companies for noncompliance. He also said that European sanctions tended to target political figures rather than businessmen.
U.S. Collateral Damage
Randi Levinas, executive vice president and chief operations officer of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, a trade organization, told the conference that Western sanctions had also hurt U.S. companies, such as credit-card firms.
Congress, she said, needed to take a “360-degree view” of the consequences of sanctions because U.S. companies “are getting slammed” in the process.
She said Congress passed the sweeping Russia sanctions bill known as CAATSA in 2017 very quickly without giving U.S. companies the opportunity for input. Congress is currently considering several Russian sanctions bills.
“It really is incumbent on our policymakers, including those in Congress, to consider making sanctions conduct-based and targeted in such a way that they’re considering the impact on U.S. companies, on U.S. national economic interests, and our U.S. global competitiveness,” she said.
U.S. companies could lose out on business to Chinese firms in Russia, she said.
Levinas said U.S. sanctions-policy development could shift back to the White House from Congress when President-elect Joe Biden takes office next month.
While some have speculated that Biden could impose more sanctions on Russia, Levinas said a lot “will depend on Russia and its actions.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
An Iranian official has rejected online rumors that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is gravely ill, saying that the 81-year-old cleric was going about his business as usual.
“By the grace of God and with the good prayers of devotees, the gentleman (Ayatollah Khamenei) is in good health and is busy vigorously carrying out his plans according to his routine,” Mehdi Fazaeli, an official with an office tasked with publishing the supreme leader’s works, tweeted on December 7.
The tweet followed reports by foreign news outlets that a visit between Khamenei and President Hassan Rohani had been canceled and the supreme leader’s duties handed over to one of his sons, 51-year-old Mojtaba Khamenei, who has no political position.
Ayatollah Khamenei was reportedly last seen in public on November 24, the date of his official Twitter account’s last post.
Khamenei is the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East, having been Iran’s supreme leader since 1989. Prior to his election to the position, which gives him a say in all matters of state, Khamenei was Iran’s president from 1981 to 1989.
In 2014, Khamenei underwent successful surgery for prostate cancer.
On December 7, the IRNA state news agency blamed a fall in Tehran’s bourse index on an unidentified “rumor.”
According to Iran’s Tasnim news agency, the rumor of Khamenei’s declining health started with a “fake” tweet in Arabic attributed to a “separatist individual based in London.”
State television has denied that a meeting of the Assembly of Experts, a body of clerics that is empowered with selecting the supreme leader, had convened.
Tasnim said that an image of the purported meeting circulating on social media was “fake.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A machine gun equipped with a “satellite-controlled smart system” was used to kill Iran’s top nuclear scientist, a senior official with the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has said.
Officials have blamed Israel for the brazen, daytime attack on November 27 in Absard, some 60 kilometers from the capital, Tehran, though it didn’t offer any evidence for the claim.
Israel, which has been blamed for the assassination of at least four other Iranian nuclear scientists, has not commented on the attack.
The November 27 killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is the latest in a string of killings of men allegedly linked to Iran’s nuclear program. Fakhrizadeh is at least the fifth Iranian scientist to have been assassinated or die in mysterious circumstances since 2007.
Speaking in Tehran on December 6, IRGC Deputy Commander Ali Fadavi said the smart system had “zoomed in” on Fakhrizadeh’s face using “artificial intelligence” while adding that Fakhrizadeh’s wife — who was only “25 centimeters away” — was unharmed.
Fadavi confirmed earlier reports that there were no assassins on the ground to carry out the killing.
He said the special weapon fired a total of 13 times, hitting Fakhrizadeh four or five times, including a shot to his spinal cord that caused severe bleeding and led to his death as he was being transported via helicopter to a Tehran hospital.
IRGC Deputy Commander Ali Fadavi (file photo)
Four bullets also hit the chief of Fakhrizadeh’s security detail, who had attempted to protect him by “throwing himself” on the nuclear scientist, Fadavi said. That confirmed media reports that one of Fakhrizadeh’s bodyguards had been injured in the attack.
He also said that 11 bodyguards were accompanying Fakhrizadeh and that the explosion of a truck during the attack targeted the security team.
Fadavi’s account is the latest version of the assassination that has resulted in serious criticism of Iran’s security apparatus.
Initial reports immediately after the killing suggested that the scientist was targeted in a suicide attack, which included several gunmen. But media later only reported that the assault included gunfire and a truck explosion.
A filmmaker close to the hard-line faction of Iran’s establishment, which also includes the IRGC and other groups, said hours after the attack that 12 gunmen, including two snipers and a powerful car bomb, were involved in the ambush of Fakhrizadeh’s four-vehicle convoy.
Later, the IRGC-affiliated Fars news agency reported that there were no hitmen on the ground and that the attack was carried out by a remote-controlled machine gun mounted on a pickup truck that later exploded.
Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani had also said there were no attackers on the ground while blaming Israel and suggesting the exiled Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq Organzation had played a role.
In an interview with state-controlled television, one of Fakhrizadeh’s sons, Hamed Fakhrizadeh, said his father had been warned by his security team on the day he was assassinated not to travel.
But the top scientist, who kept a low-profile, had said that, due to a class he was teaching as well as an “important meeting,” he needed to return to Tehran.
‘Full-Blown War Zone’
Hamed Fakhrizadeh described the scene of the assassination, which he came to shortly after the attack, as a “full-blown war zone.”
His brother, Mehdi Fakhirzadeh, said in the same interview that his father was shot at a close range of four or five meters and that their mother, who he said had sat on the ground next to Fakhrizadeh, was unhurt.
“She said ‘I don’t understand how the bullets didn’t hit me. I went there so that the bullets would not hit [Fakhrizadeh],’” he quoted his mother as having said.
The comments could either confirm Fadavi’s account regarding a “satellite-controlled” weapon equipped with facial-recognition technology or suggest that snipers shot and killed the nuclear scientist.
Fakhrizadeh’s assassination and the various accounts of how it was carried out have raised many questions, including the possible presence of “infiltrators” within Iran’s security apparatus who would have precise information about the movement of the country’s leading nuclear scientist, who was mentioned by name in a 2018 presentation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
If the official account regarding the remote-controlled killing is true, it is clear that the attack was well-planned and that someone had installed the alleged “remote-controlled” gun and a bomb on the truck before driving it to the site of the assassination. Some reports said the owner of the Nissan pickup truck had left Iran shortly before the attack.
One major question is how the special equipment needed for the sophisticated attack was smuggled into Iran.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh
It is also not clear why Fakhrizadeh — who knew that he was a wanted man due to his role in the country’s nuclear program and who, according to officials, had survived previous failed assassination attempts — had decided to get out of his vehicle during the attack. It’s especially strange because several media accounts say his vehicle was bullet-proof.
Fakhrizadeh’s sons confirmed earlier reports that their father left his vehicle because he thought it had broken down after hearing the bullets hitting the car.
But it is unclear why he didn’t ask someone on his security team to find out what was happening instead of putting himself at risk by leaving the vehicle.
Officials have vowed to avenge Fakhrizadevh’s killing, which came nearly a year after the U.S. assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, who led the IRGC Quds Force in charge of the group’s regional activities. Soleimani was killed in a drone attack near Baghdad in January in an attack that the U.S. claimed responsibility for.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.