A court in northwestern Russia is set to deliver its verdict on April 28 in the case against an activist accused of “distributing pornography” for sharing a video by the German rock band Rammstein in 2014.
Amnesty International called the case against Andrei Borovikov, who faces three years in prison if convicted, as “utterly absurd,” saying he was being “punished solely for his activism, not his musical taste.”
Borovikov was formerly the coordinator of jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s Arkhangelsk regional headquarters.
Describing Borovikov’s prosecution as “a mockery of justice,” the London-based human rights group’s Moscow office director, Natalia Zviagina, called for all charges against him to be dropped.
“The Russian authorities should be focusing on turning around the spiraling human rights crisis they have created, not devising ludicrous new ways of prosecuting and silencing their critics,” Zviagina said in a statement ahead of the verdict.
In 2014, Borovikov shared a music video for Rammstein’s song titled Pussy on the Russian social network VKontakte.
More than six years later, in September 2020, the activist was charged with “production and distribution of pornography.”
Prosecutors have requested a three-year sentence in a high security penal colony if Borovikov is found guilty by the Lomonosovsky District Court in Arkhangelsk.
“This is not the first time the Russian authorities have used an overbroad definition of ‘pornography’ as a pretext for locking up their critics,” Zviagina said, citing the case of Yulia Tsvetkova, an LGBT activist from Russia’s Far East who stood trial earlier this month on pornography charges over her drawings of women’s bodies.
“It is astonishing that cases like this even make it to court,” Zviagina said.
Rammstein: the metal band are no strangers to controversy
The music video posted by Borovikov came to the authorities’ attention six months ago when a former volunteer at his office informed the police. Amnesty International said it suspected the volunteer was employed as an agent provocateur to help fabricate the case.
The prosecution said the video had been seen by “not fewer than two people” and ordered “a sexological and cultural examination” of the clip, before experts found it to be of “pornographic nature” and “not containing artistic value.”
Rammstein are no strangers to controversy.
In Belarus, the Council for Public Morals in 2010 protested against Rammstein’s concerts in the country that year, saying the band’s shows were “open propaganda of homosexuality, masochism, and other forms of perversions, violence, cruelty, and vulgarism.”
In 2019, a man in Belarus was charged with producing and distributing pornographic materials for posting a clip in 2014 of the band’s video Pussy, which showed graphic sex scenes.
That same year, a video for the group’s song Deutschland showed band members dressed as concentration camp prisoners, sparking outrage, especially among Jewish groups.
Saudi Arabia’s crown prince struck a softer tone toward Iran in a television interview broadcast late on April 27 in which he also said that Saudi Arabia and the Biden administration agreed on most issues of mutual concern.
“Iran is a neighboring country, and all we aspire for is a good and special relationship with Iran,” Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman said.
“We do not want Iran’s situation to be difficult. On the contrary, we want Iran to grow…and to push the region and the world towards prosperity.”
Riyadh has been working with regional and global partners to find solutions to Tehran’s “negative behavior,” he added.
The two countries cut ties in 2016 after Iranian protesters attacked Saudi diplomatic missions following the kingdom’s execution of a revered Shi’ite cleric. They also back opposite sides in the war in Yemen, where a coalition led by Saudi Arabia is battling the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels.
Prince Salman’s comments were a change in tone from previous interviews in which he lashed out at Tehran, accusing it of fueling regional insecurity.
The prince did not mention any negotiations with Tehran, but there have been reports of secret direct talks taking place this month in Baghdad between the two countries.
Sources quoted by news agencies have confirmed the talks, but neither Saudi Arabia nor Iran have publicly confirmed or denied the talks.
The diplomacy comes amid an effort to revive the 2015 nuclear deal that the United States withdrew from in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump.
The prince said Saudi Arabia and the Biden administration agree on 90 percent of issues of mutual concern and disagree on the rest, but he did not elaborate.
The prince’s standing with Washington remains damaged by the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul after the Saudi journalist grew critical of the crown prince.
U.S. intelligence concluded that the crown prince had approved an operation to capture or kill Khashoggi, but Saudi officials had said his death was the result of a “rogue operation” and was not state sanctioned.
U.S. President Joe Biden said in an interview in March that he had “made it clear” to the prince’s father, 85-year-old King Salman bin Abdulaziz, “that things were going to change” in the relationship, though he also reaffirmed the decades-old alliance of their two countries.
Human rights watchdog Freedom House is warning of an “antidemocratic turn” in Europe and Eurasia, saying that elected leaders in many countries are undermining democratic institutions in order to stay in power while they promote “alternative authoritarian governance.”
Nations In Transit 2021, the annual report on the state of democracy by the Washington-based group, singles out Hungary and Poland as the worst offenders in the European Union.
It says both countries have seen “unparalleled democratic deterioration over the past decade.”
But the report also warns that the majority of countries Freedom House evaluated “are currently worse off than they were 10 years ago.”
Russia and Belarus are categorized as “consolidated authoritarian regimes” with intensifying repression during the past year.
Freedom House says: “The violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Belarus, the Kremlin’s attempted murder of anti-corruption activist and opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, and the Russian military’s recent show of force along the borders of Ukraine demonstrate the lengths to which these regimes are willing to go to stay in power.”
Armenia’s democratic rating regressed during the past year, marking “the first time its democracy has lost ground since the 2018 Velvet Revolution” in Yerevan, the report says.
Low Point
Georgia’s score returned to where it had been in 2011, “the last year before the current ruling party replaced an unpopular and increasingly repressive government,” it says.
The report says Kyrgyzstan had a “jarring return to strongman rule” under President Sadyr Japarov after previously making progress toward democratic governance — leaving its score “slightly lower than in 2010, the year of its last revolution.”
“In Ukraine, the government’s reform efforts continued to meet with strong resistance from entrenched interests during 2020,” it says.
Freedom House said that “signs of hope” included Uzbekistan and North Macedonia, which “experienced the greatest democratic progress in 2020.”
It also noted that Bosnia-Herzegovina’s democracy score improved for the first time since 2006 as a result of “a major step forward for local democratic governance” — the first municipal elections in the city of Mostar since 2008.
Nevertheless, Freedom House concludes that “the overall strength of democracy” across Europe and Eurasia has declined for 17 consecutive years.
“The number of countries classified as democracies has sunk to its lowest point since the report was first launched in 1995,” the report says.
Zselyke Csaky, Freedom House’s research director for Europe and Eurasia, says the region’s decline is especially troubling “in the context of 15 consecutive years of democratic deterioration at the global level.”
“Authoritarianism is not a purely national problem, but one that can spread to infect entire regions and even continents,” Csaky says. “European democracies and civil society groups must coordinate in support of pro-democracy movements in countries where authoritarianism in gaining ground.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has urged the Ukrainian military to remain on alert despite Russia’s drawdown of its troops from the country’s borders, saying they could return “at any moment.”
Kyiv has been battling Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine since 2014, following Moscow’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.
A Russian troop buildup in recent weeks near Ukraine’s northern and eastern borders and in Crimea has raised concerns of a major escalation of the conflict in Kyiv and in the West.
But on April 23, Moscow announced that it had started withdrawing its armed forces.
“The fact the troops are withdrawing doesn’t mean the army should not be ready for the possibility troops could return to our borders any moment,” Zelenskiy said while visiting Ukrainian military positions near Crimea on April 27 .
In Moscow, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that the troop pullback had nothing to do with Western pressure, adding that Moscow will continue doing what is necessary to protect itself.
Shoigu also voiced concern about the presence of NATO forces near Russia.
“Some even warned us that our activities on our own territory will have consequences,” Shoigu said on April 27. “I would like to emphasize that we don’t see such warnings as acceptable and will do everything that is necessary to ensure the security of our borders.”
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said this week that Washington had registered movements of some Russian troops away from Ukraine’s borders, but added that it was “too soon to tell” whether Russia was pulling back all forces.
A cease-fire that took hold in July has been unravelling recently, with clashes sharply increasing between Ukrainian forces and separatists.
Around 30 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since the start of the year compared with 50 in all of last year, while the separatists have reported at least 20 military deaths.
On April 27, the Ukrainian Army reported one soldier killed and three others wounded after their vehicle hit a mine.
A meeting occurred in Central Asia on April 23 that hasn’t ever happened before.
The governor of Uzbekistan’s eastern Ferghana Province met with the Tajik and Kyrgyz governors of the adjoining provinces for talks on economic cooperation.
Hosted in the city of Ferghana by Hayrullo Bozorov, the meeting was attended by the governor of Tajikistan’s Sughd Province, Rajabboi Ahmadzoda, and the governor of Kyrgyzstan’s Batken Province, Omurbek Suvanaliev.
Nearly 30 years after the three countries became independent, the meeting marked the first time the heads of the three neighboring provinces had ever gathered for such a meeting.
The three provinces are all in the populous Ferghana Valley, an agriculturally rich area that has also become a major smuggling route and, since independence, has seen more deadly violence along its borders than any other area in Central Asia.
And one of the interesting aspects of the business forum, officially called Integration Of Borders – The Key To Development, is that it was purely about trade and cultural relations, not border demarcation.
Batken Province Governor Omurbek Suvanaliev (file photo)
Suvanaliev told RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service, known locally as Azattyk, that although “the matter of defining the borders is being decided, it is necessary for us also to strengthen economic ties.”
And he made clear that the vital demarcation of the three countries’ borders “is the work of intergovernmental delegations.”
All three governors were accompanied by delegations from local industrial and agricultural businesses and there was also an exhibit of their products.
The only document reportedly signed was a memorandum of cooperation between the Ferghana and Sughd provinces.
It was ironic that the venue for the landmark business forum was the Islam Karimov Theater.
Late Uzbek President Islam Karimov
While Karimov was Uzbekistan’s first president, his country set up long barbed-wire fences and dug ditches along extensive stretches of its borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. During incursions by Islamic militants in the summer of 2000, Uzbekistan even put land mines at places along its borders with its two eastern neighbors.
When Karimov died late in the summer of 2016, Uzbek troops were occupying some areas of Kyrgyzstan.
His successor, Shavkat Mirziyoev, removed those troops as one of his first moves after becoming Uzbekistan’s leader.
Mirziyoev also reversed Karimov’s policies toward Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and visits by Uzbek officials and business delegations to the neighboring countries are a common occurrence now.
Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev visiting Ferghana Valley last year.
Those meetings have gone a long way towards improving Uzbekistan’s relations with its two neighbors.
The business forum in Ferghana took this new spirit of cooperation a step further by bringing together the representatives of the three countries that share the fertile Ferghana Valley region.
Though the forum did not result in the signing of large amounts of contracts, the big achievement was the meeting itself.
Though there has been some progress in demarcating and marking the borders in the region despite difficult negotiations, the process is likely to continue to be problematic in the years to come as territory is exchanged and people’s property affected.
While border negotiations continue, there is no reason why three of the areas involved in these talks should not move forward by improving economic ties.
The Ferghana business forum was the first step.
And a better economic situation locally should make all three parties more amenable to compromises in their future border negotiations.
MINSK — Belarusian authorities expect to hold a referendum early next year on the constitutional amendments promised by authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid mass protests after a presidential election last year that opposition leaders and the West say was rigged.
The chairwoman of Belarus’s Central Election Commission, Lidziya Yarmoshyna, said in an interview with Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency on April 27 that the referendum is likely to be held in January or February 2022 and not by the end of this year as some media reports have said.
She added that, if the referendum were to be held alongside local elections, the most likely date for the poll would be January 16.
Lukashenka’s opponents have expressed doubts about the amendments, calling them a sham exercise to help him to cling to power after the opposition rejected his victory in an August 9 presidential election.
Earlier in February, at a Soviet-style “All-Belarusian People’s Assembly,” Lukashenka, 66, reiterated an idea he started pushing in December that the Belarusian Constitution needed unspecified amendments.
In mid-March, he signed a decree to create of a commission on constitutional amendments which will, by August 1, outline the amendments and present them to Lukashenka.
Opposition and public outrage over what they saw as a rigged vote in the presidential election has sparked continuous protests, bringing tens of thousands onto the streets with demands for Lukashenka to step down and new elections to be held.
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.
Lukashenka, who has run the country since 1994, has denied any wrongdoing with regard to the election and refuses to negotiate with the opposition on stepping down and holding new elections.
The European Union, the United States, Canada, and other countries have refused to recognize Lukashenka as the legitimate leader of Belarus and have imposed sanctions on him and several senior Belarusian officials in response to the “falsification” of the vote and the postelection crackdown.
Ukraine has declared the Russian consul in the Black Sea port city of Odesa as ‘persona non grata’ after a second Ukrainian diplomat was kicked out of Russia in an ongoing diplomatic spat between the two countries.
The consul must leave the country by April 30 at the latest, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on April 27.
Amid already heightened tensions between Moscow and Kyiv, the latest diplomatic row was sparked by the arrest and subsequent expulsion of a Ukrainian consul earlier this month in St. Petersburg.
Russian authorities accused the diplomat of trying to acquire personal data from secret service agents.
In return, Kyiv expelled a Russian diplomat, prompting Moscow to respond by expelling a second Ukrainian on April 26.
“We completely reject the unsubstantiated allegations that the declared “persona non grata” Ukrainian diplomat allegedly engaged in activities incompatible with diplomatic status. The employee of the Embassy of Ukraine in Moscow did not carry out any actions that would go beyond his diplomatic and consular functions,” the Ukrainian statement said.
“If the Russian side continues to provoke against employees of diplomatic missions of Ukraine in Russia, we reserve the right to take further action in response,” it added.
Tense ties since Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 and Russia’s backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine have been recently heightened by a buildup of Russian troops near Ukraine and military drills in the annexed region.
For years, neither Russia nor Ukraine have had ambassadors in each other’s capital.
A Russian government regulator has slapped a fine of more than $12 million on U.S. tech giant Apple for “abusing” its dominant market position by giving preference to its own applications.
“Apple was found to have abused its dominant position in the iOS distribution market through a series of sequential actions which resulted in a competitive advantage for its own products,” the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) said in a statement on April 27.
“On April 26, 2021, the FAS of Russia imposed a turnover fine on Apple Inc of 906.3 million rubles ($12.1 million) for violating anti-monopoly legislation,” the statement said.
FAS said the decision came after ruling in favor of a complaint brought against Apple by cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab.
Apple told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency on April 27 that it “respects the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service of Russia, but does not agree with the decision” and is appealing the ruling.
The move by FAS comes after Moscow earlier this month enforced controversial legislation demanding that smartphones, tablets, and computers sold in the country come with pre-installed domestic software and apps in what was described by authorities as an effort to promote Russia’s tech companies.
However, critics say the measure, which requires all devices with Internet access sold in the country to have pre-installed approved software produced by Russian firms, is the latest attempt to tighten state control over the Internet.
Failure to observe the new requirements will result in fines starting in July.
Western technology firms have been facing increasing scrutiny in Russia in recent months under the pretext of fighting extremism and protecting minors.
Twitter has been punitively slowed down over a failure to delete content authorities said is illegal, while Google, Facebook, and TikTok have all come under fire.
In 2019, Russia passed legislation on the development of a “sovereign Internet” network that would cut off the country’s access to the World Wide Web, a move critics say is meant to muzzle free speech.
Hoteliers on Georgia’s Black Sea Coast hope huge discounts can revive Batumi’s decimated tourism industry.
It’s safe to say there is something for every traveler’s budget in Batumi, the shiny city on Georgia’s Black Sea coast.
Along the most premium stretch of pebbled shoreline, beachfront apartments are available for $12 a night. If that’s too pricey, backpackers can walk inland a few hundred meters and score a hostel bed for just $2.
A Georgian family walks along the nearly empty beachfront of Batumi.
Yet the tourists are barely coming.
Batumi had been enjoying a stratospheric rise as a holiday destination for low- and medium-budget travelers, mostly from Russia. But a one-two punch has knocked tourism cold.
First, a diplomatic spat with Russia in the summer of 2019 led to the Kremlin imposing a flight ban between the two countries. Then, in early 2020, Georgia’s borders were sealed in an attempt to snuff out the coronavirus.
The Batumi beachfront in June 2019
Mary Emiridze of the Ajara Tourism Department, which oversees Batumi, says the region welcomed more than 1.6 million tourists in 2019. In 2020, just 306,000 arrived — a drop of some 81 percent.
Emiridze says she has “never seen anything like” the lowering of prices for the accommodations that exist in Batumi. Many guesthouse owners are advertising rooms for a fraction of what they once cost as they vie for the attention of tourists.
A golden rooftop monument above Batumi’s old town
A guesthouse owner who asked to go by his anglicized name, Archie, is renting out apartments in Batumi’s old town for around one-third of his 2019 price. He estimates tourist numbers are down 90 percent from what they would usually be at this time of the year. The Batumi local says he hasn’t been “this hard up” since the 1990s, when Georgia was wracked by a civil war and economic turmoil after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Archie says some Batumi locals had to rely on family links to the untamed highlands that loom above the city to survive the past year: “A lot of people have relatives that live up in the mountains who own cows and sheep. In the mountains, they always have food. They don’t need the government. They can live by themselves.”
A security guard walks through a Soviet-era beachside structure that operates as a bar. It was empty on April 25.
Georgia is currently allowing flights from Turkey, Israel, and Ukraine, but if visitors are not vaccinated they need a fresh, negative COVID test to board their plane. On their third day in Georgia, they need to take a second COVID test. Children and babies are also required to undergo the uncomfortable nasal swab necessary to be tested, though some officials are ignoring this requirement.
Georgia remains under a curfew, meaning restaurants are closed by 8 p.m. and anyone on the street after 9 p.m. risks receiving a large fine. Food-delivery services are operating throughout the country.
Taxi drivers gamble with dice on Batumi’s harbor waterfront.
Israelis are among the most numerous tourists in Batumi these days, but Archie says the money those tourists are spending is mostly being circulated in the multinational chain hotels with adjoining casinos and high-end restaurants that line Batumi’s waterfront. Most forms of gambling are illegal in Israel and there are no public casinos. A receptionist at Batumi’s Hilton, which has a casino on its second floor, told RFE/RL the hotel was fully booked for much of April, though even that hotel had dropped its prices by some 25 percent compared to 2019.
A woman shops for groceries in the Batumi Bazaar.
The effects of Batumi’s shrunken tourist economy can also be felt away from the city’s waterfront.
In the Batumi Bazaar, Malkhaz sells crisp bushels of herbs, lettuce, and spring onions. The Batumi native says that before the summer of 2019 a large part of his business were the budget-conscious, long-term vacationers who ventured to the bustling market for their weekly grocery runs. The vegetable seller says he used to load around half a ton of vegetables from local growers into his truck every morning, but says he now barely has use for the truck and instead packs a few dozen kilos of produce into his car to take to the market.
People enjoy the sun on Batumi’s waterfront on a beautiful April day.
In Batumi’s sleepy old town, as he awaits the reservations that will signal a return of the city’s tourists, Archie uses an ancient Georgian saying that seems more relevant today than ever: “We are ready for guests, and guests are from God.”
SHYMKENT, Kazakhstan — An activist arrested in January in Kazakhstan’s southern city of Shymkent for alleged ties with two banned opposition groups has started a hunger strike.
Nurzhan Mukhammedov’s wife, Baghila Tekebaeva, told RFE/RL that her husband started the hunger strike on April 27, demanding that the charges against him — of being associated with the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) movement and the Koshe (Street) party — be dropped.
“My husband has insisted that he has no ties with the DVK and the Koshe party. He is angry that he has been kept under arrest for four months now,” Tekebaeva said.
Separately on April 27, a court in Kazakhstan’s southern town of Qapshaghai rejected a request for early release filed by the activist Almat Zhumaghulov, who was sentenced to seven years in prison in December 2018 after a court convicted him and two others of planning a “holy war” because they were spreading the ideas of DVK.
Several activists in the Central Asian nation have been handed prison sentences or parole-like sentences in recent years for their support or involvement in the activities of the DVK and its associate, Koshe party, as well as for taking part in unsanctioned rallies organized by the two groups.
DVK is led by Mukhtar Ablyazov, the fugitive former head of Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank and an outspoken critic of the Kazakh government.
Kazakh authorities labeled the DVK extremist and banned the group in March 2018.
Human rights groups have said Kazakhstan’s law on public gatherings contradicts international standards as it requires preliminary permission from authorities to hold rallies and envisions prosecution for organizing and participating in unsanctioned rallies even though the nation’s constitution guarantees its citizens the right of free assembly.
MOSCOW — Journalists and activists are under pressure in Moscow for being at a rally earlier this month demanding the immediate release of jailed opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
Police on April 27 detained Aleksei Korostelyov, a reporter for Dozhd television, for questioning regarding his presence at the protest.
After Korostelyov’s editors arrived at the police station with documents confirming that he was covering the April 21 rally as a reporter, police released him but ordered him to come back for questioning on April 30.
Meanwhile, police visited Oleg Ovcharenko, a correspondent for the Ekho Moskvy radio station, on April 27 and ordered him to produce documents for the police proving that he was at the rally in question as a reporter.
The day before, police detained professor Aleksandr Agadzhanyan from the Russian Humanitarian University for questioning and charged him with taking part in the unsanctioned April 21 demonstration.
They also detained for questioning opposition politician Leonid Gozman, and visited the homes of several activists, including human rights defender Anna Borzenko.
Writer Dmitry Bykov said he was summoned for questioning, and police reportedly switched off electricity at the apartment of artist Daniil Dvinsky after they were unable to reach him at home.
Thousands of people participated in the April 21 rallies in Moscow and other Russian cities organized by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) to express concerns over his deteriorating health in prison.
The number of demonstrators arrested by police was estimated at almost 2,000 by OVD-Info group, which monitors the detention of political protesters and activists.
On April 23, Navalny stopped the three-week hunger strike that he had launched to demand proper medical treatment for acute pain in his back, legs, and arms. Doctors had urged Navalny to end the strike, fearing his life was at risk.
Navalny was arrested on January 17 upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he received life-saving treatment for a poisoning in Siberia in August 2020.
He has insisted that his poisoning with a Soviet-style chemical nerve agent was ordered directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin has denied any role in the incident
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 have been politically motivated.
Navalny’s 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from the case was converted to a prison term, though the court said he will serve 2 1/2 years in prison given time already served in detention.
The Iranian government says an investigation has been ordered into the “conspiracy” of leaked audio in which Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says the military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) are too influential in diplomacy.
President Hassan Rohani ordered the investigation to identify who leaked the “stolen” three-hour-long recording, government spokesman Ali Rabiei told reporters on April 27.
Zarif’s comments in the recording have sparked harsh criticism from conservative media and politicians in the country since its publication by the London-based Iran International Persian-language satellite news channel late on April 25.
Among other things, Zarif complains about the extent of influence that late Major General Qasem Soleimani had over foreign policy, hinting that the top IRGC commander tried to spoil Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers by colluding with Russia.
Solemani was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020, at the time bringing the United States and Iran to the brink of war.
“This theft of documents is a conspiracy against the government, the system, the integrity of effective domestic institutions, and also against our national interests,” Rabiei told reporters, adding that Rohani “has ordered the Intelligence Ministry to identify the agents of this conspiracy.”
The day before, a Foreign Ministry spokesman described the recording as “selectively” edited and said it represented just a portion of a seven-hour interview that included “personal opinions.”
Zarif did not comment on the controversy.
The leak comes ahead of a presidential election on June 18 that will see the moderate Rohani step down after two terms in office and after conservatives fared well in parliamentary elections last year.
A Russian court has approved a motion by prosecutors to restrict jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) and his Citizens’ Rights Defense Foundation (FZPG).
“A judge of the Moscow City Court has considered the motion of the plaintiff to take interim measures of protection. The judge of the Moscow City Court has decided to use interim measures of protection in the form of prohibiting certain acts with regards to the Anti-Corruption Foundation and the Citizens’ Rights Defense Foundation noncommercial organizations,” the court’s press office said on April 27.
It did not specify the restrictions.
The day before, the Moscow prosecutor halted all activities of Navalny’s regional offices. It 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 court label the FBK, the FZPG, and Navalny’s regional headquarters, as “extremist” organizations.
That proposal has been condemned by international and domestic human rights groups, who say that if the Navalny’s organizations are labeled “extremist,” their employees and those passing on information about them could face arrest and lengthy prison terms.
TARAZ, Kazakhstan — A court in Kazakhstan’s southern Zhambyl region has handed down sentences to 51 defendants in a case over deadly ethnic clashes that shocked the Central Asian country in February 2020.
The court on April 27 sentenced eight defendants to prison terms of between 15 and 20 years after finding them guilty of murder and taking part in mass disorder.
Another defendant was sentenced to 11 years in prison, one to seven years in prison, and seven men were sentenced to five years in prison each. One defendant was acquitted while the remainder were handed parole-like “freedom-limitation” sentences for periods of between two and six years.
The defendants, according to their roles in the clashes between Kazakhs and Kazakh citizens from the ethnic Dungan minority — a Muslim group of Chinese origin — were found guilty of various crimes including murder, organizing and participating in mass disorder, illegal arms and ammunition possession, robbery, separatism, threatening the lives of military personnel, armed mass disorder, and hooliganism.
The high-profile trial started in December and was held inside a detention center in the regional capital, Taraz.
The violence in the villages of Sortobe, Masanchi, Auqatty, and Bulan-Batyr that erupted in early February 2020 following a road-rage brawl left 11 people dead and dozens injured, including 19 police officers.
In September, seven ethnic Kazakhs were tried separately in the case and sentenced to prison terms ranging between three years and four years.
Four of them were released from prison in November after a military court in Almaty replaced their prison terms with freedom-limitation sentences.
In April 2020, an ethnic Dungan involved in the case was found guilty of hooliganism and inflicting bodily harm and sentenced to 30 months in prison. Another Dungan was handed a suspended prison sentence on the same charges.
More than 30 houses, 17 commercial buildings, and 47 vehicles were destroyed or damaged in the clashes, and more than 20,000 people, mostly Dungans, fled the villages where the violence erupted.
Many of the Dungans who fled the violence ended up in the neighboring Kyrgyz region of Chui, where the majority of Central Asia’s Dungans reside.
Kazakh officials said at the time that the majority of the displaced Dungans returned to Kazakhstan several days later.
Many senior regional officials, including the Zhambyl region’s governor, Asqar Myrzakhmetov, and local police chief, were fired by the central government in the aftermath of the clashes.
Dungans, also known as Hui, are Sunni Muslims who speak a dialect of Mandarin that also uses words and phrases borrowed from Arabic, Persian, and Turkic.
Their ancestors fled China in the late 19th century after the Chinese government’s violent crackdown of the Dungan Revolt of 1862-77, and settled in Central Asia, then part of the Russian empire.
The total number of Dungans now living in former Soviet republics is about 120,000.
Most reside in Kyrgyzstan’s northern region of Chui and Kazakhstan’s neighboring region of Zhambyl.
The United Kingdom has announced its first round of sanctions under its new global anti-corruption regime, freezing assets and imposing restrictions on 14 individuals from Russia, as well as eight others from different parts of the world.
The 14 Russians were hit with sanctions for their involvement in corruption uncovered by the late Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer and whistle-blower who helped reveal the theft of nearly $230 million from Russia’s government through fraudulent tax refunds.
The targeted Russian nationals’ assets in the United Kingdom have been frozen and they are barred from visiting the United Kingdom, according to the measures.
“As with our Global Human Rights sanctions approach, the anti-corruption sanctions are not intended to target whole countries or whole peoples, but rather to ta get the individuals who are responsible, and should be held responsible, for graft and the cronies who support or benefit from their corrupt acts,” British Foreign Secretary Dominik Raab said in announcing the sanctions..
The sanctioned Russian citizens include Dmitry Klyuyev, identified as the owner of Universal Savings Bank in Russia.
The U.K.’s new Magnitsky act, which is similar to a law enacted in the United States, is named after the Russian lawyer who was arrested and died in prison in Moscow in 2009 after accusing Russian officials of the massive tax fraud.
In the measures announced on April 26, Britain also targeted Ajay, Atul and Rajesh Gupta, Indian-born brothers at the center of a South African corruption scandal that was one of the reasons for Jacob Zuma’s resignation in February 2018.
Sanctions were also imposed on three people accused of corruption in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, including facilitating bribes to support a major drug-trafficking cartel.
Raab told British lawmakers that the sanctions would prevent the country from being used as “a haven for dirty money.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hailed the British sanctions, saying they strengthened efforts to counter corruption globally.
The United States says boats from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) harassed two U.S. Coast Guard ships in the Persian Gulf early this month, in what the U.S. Navy described as the first such incident in a year.
The U.S. Navy said on April 27 that the tense, April 2 encounter resulted in no injuries or damage.
Iran did not immediately acknowledge the incident, which occurred as Washington and Tehran announced they would conduct indirect negotiations aimed at reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
The talks between Iran and world powers began in Vienna earlier this month and are to resume in the Austrian capital on April 27.
U.S. Navy officials said that three Iranian fast-attack craft and a support vessel known as Harth 55 swarmed two Coast Guard ships while they were patrolling international waters in the Persian Gulf.
The Harth 55 ship repeatedly crossed in front of the bows of USCGC Monomoy and USCGC Wrangell, forcing the Coast Guard vessels to come to make defensive maneuvers to avoid collision, the officials said.
“The U.S. crews issued multiple warnings via bridge-to-bridge radio, five short blasts from the ships’ horns, and while the Harth 55 responded to the bridge-to-bridge radio queries, they continued the unsafe maneuvers,” according to Commander Rebecca Rebarich, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet.
“After approximately three hour of the U.S. issuing warning and conducting defensive maneuvers, the [Iranian] vessels maneuvered away from the U.S. ships and opened distance between them.”
The interaction marked the first “unsafe and unprofessional” incident involving Iranian warships since April 15 last year, Rebarich added.
It followed a series of incidents across the Middle East attributed to a shadow war between Iran and its foe Israel, which included attacks on cargo ships and alleged sabotage at Iran’s Natanz nuclear site.
The European Union and the United States have rejected the idea of redrawing borders in the Western Balkans in response to an unofficial proposal to break up Bosnia-Herzegovina and merge Kosovo with Albania.
A document that has circulated among EU officials proposes incorporating parts of Bosnia into Serbia and Croatia to help the region’s EU integration, according to Reuters, which said it had seen the document but could not verify its authenticity.
“We are absolutely not in favor of any changes in borders,” European Commission spokesman Eric Mamer told a news conference.
The United States also rejected the proposal, warning that moving the borders risked exacerbating tensions in the region.
“Recent unwarranted speculation about changing borders in the Balkans along ethnic lines risks fostering instability in the region and evokes memories of past tensions,” U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement quoted by Reuters.
In an interview last week with a U.S. think tank, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic referred to a document proposing “the unification of Kosovo and Albania” and “joining a larger part of the [Bosnian] Republika Srpska territory with Serbia.”
Vucic dismissed the idea, saying his government was “not interested in creating any kind of Greater Serbia.”
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas last week also rejected the proposal, saying the idea had been “put back into a drawer.”
The discussion has alarmed Bosnia, which sees it as a threat to its territorial unity two decades after ethnic conflicts led to war in the region.
Two former Yugoslav republics, Croatia and Slovenia, have joined the EU. Montenegro, Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo hope to accede. The EU says they must first settle conflicts and advance democratic reforms.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said separately on April 26 after talks with Vucic in Brussels that the EU wants to “continue to see positive developments in rule of law” in Serbia as part of accession talks.
The two discussed Belgrade’s talks with Kosovo, whose independence is not recognized by Serbia and several EU countries.
Von der Leyen said the bloc would support the construction of a railway between Belgrade and North Macedonia, which saw its hopes to formally start membership negotiations dashed last year after a veto from Bulgaria.
The leaders of North Macedonia and Kosovo are also due in Brussels this week.
Belarusian authorities have enforced tight security measures in Minsk to prevent an opposition rally marking the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Military and police forces flooded the center of the Belarusian capital on April 26, blocking central avenues to thwart the march. Police arrested about 20 people, according to the Vyasna human rights group.
The actions were part of an ongoing brutal crackdown on protests that began after a disputed reelection in August that gave strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka a sixth term, a vote that the opposition says was rigged.
Crisis In Belarus
Read our coverage as Belarusians continue to demand the resignation of Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid a brutal crackdown on protesters. The West refuses to recognize him as the country’s legitimate leader after an August 9 election considered fraudulent.
Lukashenka’s clampdown has included thousands of detentions. Some of the protesters detained have reported beatings and other rights abuses. Some 350 political prisoners remain behind bars, according to Vyasna.
The clampdown has also included a massive security presence to dissuade protests and restrictions on journalists trying to report about the movement to oust Lukashenka.
Earlier on April 26, several dozen women dressed in black and carrying black umbrellas staged a demonstration on the outskirts of the capital. There were no detentions at that demonstration, although it was not authorized.
The women tied long yellow-and-black ribbons on their wrists and wore face masks with the yellow-and-black symbol for nuclear power. They marched in the Malinauka district, an area nicknamed Chernobyl because people who left areas of Belarus affected by radiation from the accident were given apartments there.
The Belarusian opposition has accused the authorities of concealing the true scope of the Chernobyl disaster, which contaminated large areas in Belarus.
An explosion and fire caused by a reactor meltdown at the Chernobyl power plant located 110 kilometers north of Kyiv on April 26, 1986 sent radiation across much of Europe.
In years past, the opposition in Belarus marked the anniversary with marches, reflecting the damage the country has suffered, including a suspected increase in the rate of cancer.
Lukashenka marked the anniversary this year by taking part in a requiem rally in the town of Bragin, southeast of Minsk.
Opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who left Belarus after the election for security reasons, spent April 26 meeting with ambassadors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
“We discussed the effective use of the OSCE mechanisms for new free & fair elections in Belarus and the solidarity of the global community with Belarusians,” Tsikhanouskaya said on Twitter.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on April 26 denounced U.S. President Joe Biden’s recognition of the Armenian genocide, saying the move would have a “destructive impact” on relations between the two countries.
In a televised address following a cabinet meeting, Erdogan told Biden to first “look in the mirror” before blaming the Turkish nation for committing genocide, pointing to the deaths of millions of Native Americans.
“You cannot get up and put the genocide label on the Turkish nation,” Erdogan said in his first major remarks on the issue.
Biden on April 24 became the first U.S. president to use the word genocide in a formal statement to describe the World War I-era massacre and deportation of Armenians in the final days of the Ottoman Empire. The date commemorates the anniversary of when on April 24, 1915, thousands of Armenian intellectuals suspected of hostility toward Ottoman rule were rounded up in Istanbul.
Previous U.S. administrations have avoided using the term genocide for decades in order not to provoke Turkey, a NATO ally and important regional power.
But Biden felt an opportunity to make an “historical acknowledgement of what took place in 1915” based on a “deep respect for the importance of universal human rights,” U.S. Ambassador to Armenia Lynne Tracy said in an interview with RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on April 26.
Describing Biden’s position as “unfounded and contrary to facts,” Erdogan repeated the Turkish position that the issue should be left to historians and not politicians. For years, Turkey has said it will open its archives to a joint history commission to address the issue.
“We believe that these comments were included in the declaration following pressure from radical Armenian groups and anti-Turkish circles. But this situation does not reduce the destructive impact of these comments,” Erdogan said.
He added that he will meet with Biden during a NATO summit in June to discuss “opening a new door” on relations.
“Now we need to look at how we will take steps toward the future. Otherwise, there will be no other choice but to put into effect the policies required by the new low to which our relations have sunk,” he said.
Tense U.S.-Turkish Relations
Biden’s statement came at a time of already tense relations between Turkey and the United States over Ankara’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 missile system, U.S. ties with Kurdish forces in Syria that Turkey considers linked to its own Kurdish militants, and a host of other matters.
Erdogan also criticized the United States for having failed to find a solution in the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh — where the United States, Russia, and France were mediators — and said Washington had stood by as massacres unfolded.
“Unfortunately, more than 1 million Azeri brothers were forced from Karabakh. All of Karabakh was burned and destroyed,” he said, referring to displacement that occurred nearly three decades ago.
Turkey backed Azerbaijan in the conflict last year, in which Azerbaijan took back swathes of lands in the Nagorno-Karabakh region it had lost to ethnic Armenian forces in the early 1990s.
Weaving through Turkey’s view of history, Erdogan went on to describe numerous “Armenian lies” and criticize the West for “double standards.”
During and immediately after World War I, Armenians and many historians say as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed, in what Armenians call “The Great Crime.” Armenians have documented mass murder, banditry, raping of women, pillaging of property, and other atrocities.
As the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, Turkey objects to the use of the word genocide and says that hundreds of thousands of Muslims also died in Anatolia at the time due to combat, starvation, cold, and disease.
The official Turkish position is that Armenian revolutionaries constituted a fifth column allied with Russia during World War I, and that the mass deportation and accompanying Armenian deaths were not premeditated or intentional. Turkey puts the number of Armenian dead at a couple of hundred thousand.
“You can find mass graves of Turks who were murdered in our country, but nowhere you can find an Armenian mass grave,” Erdogan claimed.
“A million Turks and Kurds are said to have been massacred by Armenian gangs. April 24 is the day when the leaders of Armenian gangs were arrested [in Istanbul]. In fact, nothing in the sense of human tragedy has happened on this day,” Erdogan said.
Erdogan also said that as many as 10 million ethnic Turks and Muslims were killed or expelled from the Balkans and Caucasus in the final decades and years of the Ottoman Empire due to Western-backed ethnic nationalism and Russian expansion.
“Half of our nation has its origins in being exiled,” he said. “As Turkey, we never seek to exploit our own pain.”
With reporting by AP, TRT Haber, Anadolu Ajansi, and Yeni Safak
MOSCOW — A Moscow court has increased from one minute to two hours the time allowed outside each day for three of the four editors of the student magazine Doxa, who are accused of “engaging minors in actions that might be dangerous” over a video related to unsanctioned rallies protesting opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s incarceration.
The Moscow City Court on April 26 upheld a lower court’s decision to impose pretrial restrictions for Armen Aramyan, Vladimir Metyolkin, and Natalya Tyshkevich, but mitigated the restrictions, ruling that the trio is allowed outside for two hours daily from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m.
A decision on the appeal of the fourth editor in the case, Alla Gutnikova, is expected to be made by the court on April 28.
On April 14, the Basmanny district court in the Russian capital ordered the four editors not to leave their homes between midnight and 11:59 p.m. for two months, giving them only one minute to be outside each day.
The four were detained for questioning at the Investigation Committee after their homes and the magazine’s offices were searched over the video, which the magazine posted online in January.
The video questioned teachers’ moves to warn students about possible repercussions they could face for participating in unsanctioned rallies on January 23 and January 31 in protest of Navalny’s arrest.
Doxa editors say the video was deleted from the magazine’s website following a demand from Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor to remove it.
More than 10,000 supporters of Navalny were detained across Russia during and after the January rallies. Many of the detained men and women were either fined or handed several-day jail terms. At least 90 were charged with criminal offenses and several have been fired by their employers.
Human rights groups have called on Moscow repeatedly to stop targeting journalists because they are covering the protests or express solidarity with protesters since both are protected under the right to freedom of expression.
“Instead of targeting journalists, the authorities should hold accountable police who attack journalists and interfere with their work,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement on February 3.
Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport on January 17 upon his arrival from Germany, where he was recovering from a poisoning, which several European laboratories concluded was a military-grade chemical nerve agent, in Siberia in August 2020.
Navalny has insisted that his poisoning was ordered directly by President Vladimir Putin, which the Kremlin has denied.
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 as being politically motivated. Navalny’s 3 1/2 year suspended sentence from the case was converted to a jail term, though the court said he will serve 2 1/2 years in prison given the amount of time he had been held in detention.
The Czech government on April 26 reiterated that evidence linking Russian GRU military intelligence to arms depot explosions in 2014 is “very convincing,” after President Milos Zeman cast doubt over allegations that have sparked a deep diplomatic rift with Russia.
Zeman, who is known for being sympathetic toward Moscow, said during a televised address to the nation on April 25 that there are two theories about what caused the explosion of a munitions depot near the eastern Czech town of Vrbetice in 2014.
He said that one version of events is that Russian intelligence was involved in the deadly explosion.
The other version, he said, was that the blast was caused by inexpert handling of ammunition.
“I take both lines [of investigation] seriously and I wish that they are thoroughly investigated,” Zeman said.
Prime Minister Andrej Babis on April 17 announced that investigators from the Czech intelligence and security services had provided “unequivocal evidence” that there was “reasonable suspicion regarding a role of members of Russian military intelligence GRU’s unit 29155 in the explosion of the munition depot in Vrbetice in 2014.”
In response, the Czech government announced the expulsion of 18 Russian diplomats it considered to be spies, setting off a string of tit-for-tat moves between Prague and Moscow.
GRU Involvement
Citing the report by the Czech Security Information Service, Zeman said that there was “neither proof nor evidence” that the two Russian GRU agents being sought regarding possible involvement in the explosion were at the arms depot.
“I hope that we will determine the truth and find out whether this suspicion [of Russian intelligence involvement] is justified,” Zeman said. “If that is the case — although I support fair relations with all important countries — the Russian Federation would have to pay the price of this presumed terrorist act.”
In response to Zeman’s comments, Deputy Prime Minister Jan Hamacek, who is also the interior minister, said information from intelligence, police, and investigators on the 2014 blasts was strong.
“As the Czech Republic we reacted very hard, so it is apparent the evidence was very convincing,” Hamacek said at a April 26 news conference.
“As far as I know, only one line of investigation exists on the Vrbetice case and that is the one connected with movements of those members of the [GRU] unit 29155,” Hamacek said.
“The president’s speech was such that everybody found something in it to please them including the Russian Federation, unfortunately,” he added.
Zeman, whose powers as president are largely ceremonial, has often expressed pro-Russian views and is seen as being friendly toward Moscow.
The explosion on October 16, 2014 in Vrbetice set off 50 tons of stored ammunition, killing two people. Two months later, another blast of 13 tons of ammunition occurred at the same site.
The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the incident, which has triggered anti-Russia protests in the Czech Republic.
More protests are planned for April 29 in Prague and other cities, this time also taking aim at Zeman for his position on Russia.
Czech media has reported that the ammunition and weaponry destroyed in the first Vrbetice blast was intended for Ukrainian forces fighting against Russia-backed separatist troops in eastern Ukraine.
The two Russian intelligence officers sought in relation to the explosion are the same GRU officers accused of a nerve-agent poisoning in England in 2018 that targeted former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.
BISHKEK — Kyrgyzstan’s Foreign Ministry has summoned the Tajik ambassador and handed him a note protesting the detainment of two Kyrgyz men by Tajik authorities near a disputed segment of the border between the two countries.
The ministry said on April 26 that Deputy Foreign Minister Nurlan Niyazaliev met with Tajik Ambassador Nazirmad Alizoda to express his concerns over the detainment of the two residents of Kyrgyzstan’s southern Batken region.
“The Kyrgyz side has called upon the Tajik side to undertake immediate measures to find out all of the circumstances of the incident, hold all individuals responsible for the situation accountable, and inform the Kyrgyz side about the results,” the ministry said in a statement.
The statement added that Bishkek is ready to cooperate with Dushanbe in efforts to “form conditions in the areas close to the border to secure peace, safety, a friendly neighborhood, and stability.”
The two Kyrgyz nationals disappeared in the Batken region’s Leilek district on April 24 while constructing a house close to a disputed segment of border.
It later turned out that the missing men had been detained by Tajik law enforcement.
On April 25, the men were released and handed to Kyrgyzstan.
Earlier in April, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon said during his visit to Tajikistan’s Vorukh exclave within Kyrgyzstan that agreements on almost half of the Tajik-Kyrgyz border have been reached during more than 100 rounds of negotiations between Dushanbe and Bishkek since work on border delimitation started in 2002.
Many border areas in Central Asia’s former Soviet republics have been disputed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The situation is particularly complicated near the numerous exclaves in the volatile Ferghana Valley, where the borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan meet.
In recent years there have been numerous incidents along the border which in some cases involved deadly gunfire.
BISHKEK — Thousands of people have paid their last respects to to Kyrgyz writer and journalist Beksultan Jakiev, who died at the age of 85 after a long unspecified illness on April 25.
Prime Minister Ulukbek Maripov, Parliament Speaker Talant Mamytov, former President Sooronbai Jeenbekov, and other officials attended the farewell ceremony on April 26 at Bishkek’s Opera and Ballet Theater.
President Sadyr Japarov’s letter of condolence to the late writer’s relatives, friends, and colleagues was read aloud at the ceremony.
Jakiev was known for his books and articles about Kyrgyz culture and history as well as about modern Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia.
One of his most popular books was about the history of RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service, known locally as Radio Azattyk, and its long-time Cold War-era director Azamat Altay.
Jakiev was the recipient of numerous national awards and titles, including Hero of Kyrgyzstan, for his contribution to the former Soviet republic’s literature, culture, and journalism.
A journalist from Siberia who had to leave her native city of Kiselyovsk in the Siberian region of Kemerovo earlier this year after she was attacked says she has fled Russia fearing for her safety.
Natalya Zubkova, the chief editor of the News of Kiselyovsk website, told RFE/RL on April 26 that she moved to an unspecified country a week ago after police and an investigator from Kiselyovsk visited her at her new residence in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg to question her as “a witness” in a criminal case.
Zubkova said she refused to answer any questions and called her lawyer. According to her, the case might be an another move in ongoing attempts by Kiselyovsk authorities to take her daughter from her in retaliation for her articles criticizing authorities in the Kemerovo region for the “illegal widening of coal-mining territories” in the region.
In late February, Zubkova said an unknown attacker pushed her down with her face in snow as she was walking her dog. The man threatened the journalist and her daughters with further violence if “you open your mouth again.”
Several days after the attack, Zubkova fled Kiselyovsk for Yekaterinburg, hoping that authorities in her native region will leave her alone.
Russia’s Investigative Committee said on April 6 that it had sent an investigator to Yekaterinburg to question Zubkova in the case.
Zubkova told RFE/RL on April 26 that she will continue her journalistic activities, writing about the rights of Siberia’s indigenous ethnic groups, environmental damage from mining activities in the region, and corruption among officials in Kiselyovsk.
Last August, lawyer Anton Reutov physically attacked her in a courtroom during a hearing based on Zubkova’s report about alleged fraud involving Reutov that led to an elderly woman losing her apartment.
Zubkova said that following that incident she received several death threats.
In August 2019, Mayor Shkarabeinikov accused Zubkova of inciting social discord for interviewing Kiselyovsk residents who had asked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to provide them with asylum after local authorities were unable to solve environmental problems they faced.
In the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986, parents in the hard-hit regions of Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia were desperate to get their children out of the irradiated zone, if only for a few weeks.
Ultimately, tens of thousands would spend summer vacations in the West, including Ireland, where a local longtime nuclear disarmament activist was at the vanguard of efforts to help the children of Chernobyl, as they came to be called.
One of those who spent time in Ireland was 14-year-old Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Thirty-five years later she is the leader of the beleaguered Belarusian opposition to Aleksandr Lukashenka, the authoritarian long-time ruler she challenged in a presidential election last August.
Tsikhanouskaya, who was forced out of Belarus amid massive protests following the election, in which she and supporters say she beat Lukashenka despite his claim of a landslide victory, now travels across Europe to drum up diplomatic support for the opposition and a new, free and fair election.
But back in 1996 — a decade after the disaster — Tsikhanouskaya was a first-time visitor to the West, taking a trip that both shocked and amazed her.
In an interview with Current Time, Tsikhanouskaya recounted the kindness and hospitality she was shown in Ireland – not to mention the potato chips and ketchup.
Tsikhanouskaya was three years old and lived in the village of Mikashevichy, in the Brest region of western Belarus, when the explosion that destroyed Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl, to the southeast in Ukraine, spewed windblown radiation over a territory the size of Germany.
A Brief Escape
Hundreds of thousands of people were relocated, and nearly 600,000 so-called ‘liquidators’, many working with no protection, sacrificed their health to contain and seal the fiery reactor, as well as clean the contaminated area.
For children, Chernobyl posed its own unique health risks. Affected areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia – Soviet republics at the time — also witnessed “a significant increase in the incidence of childhood thyroid diseases including thyroid cancer,” according to the World Health Organization. For example, thyroid cancer rates rose “about 100 times” in the Belarusian region of Homel after the accident.
In 1991, Adi Roche, active in the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, would establish the Chernobyl Children International (CCI), to provide medical and other aid to the nuclear disaster’s youngest victims, as well as organize trips abroad for many of them.
Adi Roche at a children’s home in Belarus. (file photo)
The CCI said it has delivered some 107 million euros of aid to impoverished communities and children across Chernobyl-affected regions since 1986. More than 26,500 children have also traveled to Ireland to stay with host families on rest and recuperation holidays, that, according to CCI’s website, continue to this day.
Modelled after the CCI, the Chernobyl Lifeline also organized trips to Ireland for the youth affected by Chernobyl. In 1996, when she was 14, Tsikhanouskaya was included in one such group.
“I don’t know why I qualified for that program. Probably because I had studied well,” Tsikhanouskaya told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
Now 38, Tsikhanouskaya said that even at that time, 10 years after the world’s worst nuclear disaster, few in Belarus – which had gained independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 — fully grasped the scale of what had happened at Chernobyl.
“All the time in Belarus, in my hometown, we were taken for tests. Medical teams would come to examine our thyroid glands. At that time, it wasn’t understood the scale of it. Chernobyl, radiation — we heard it at the time, but that at that age we couldn’t comprehend how bad it was,” Tsikhanouskaya recounted.
Belarusian oppostition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya earlier this year.
“That understanding only came later after you could study the topic and then there was the Internet, and you could find out more. Up till then, all you knew came from rumors, from your parents, who themselves didn’t really know much as well.”
The nuclear disaster, however, was apparently far from the minds of most of the children picked for the program, explained Tsikhanouskaya.
“You know, the kids in the polluted zone were happy, because it was an opportunity to go abroad. That’s how it was seen,” she said.
‘Lots Of Kindness, Lots Of Love’
Her first visit abroad, Tsikhanouskaya was awed by much of what she saw and experienced.
“Of course, I was also struck by the people themselves — open, friendly, smiling, saying ‘thank you,’ ‘you’re welcome.’ It was kind of gloomy at home, at least in my town,” Tskikhanouskaya told Current Time. “And then suddenly you arrive at the home of complete strangers, and they treat you like family, lots of kindness, lots of love. They tried to entertain all the kids as much as possible.”
The food, some of which she tasted for the first time, also fascinated her.
“More than anything else, I was surprised by some of the food that we didn’t have – potato chips, french fries, hamburgers,” she said. “Maybe it was already there in the capital of Belarus, but I had never been there with my parents, so it was all unknown to me. I tried ketchup for the first time there, not our tomato sauce, but real ketchup.”
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Ireland
Tsikhanouskaya stayed with the family of Henry Deane, who had organized the group’s trip. She remained in touch with the family afterwards, and he invited her back a few years later to help organize similar trips for others.
“My job was to prepare documents, arrange flights, assign the kids to families. They would call me if there were any problems. If the child was sad, homesick, they called me, and I talked to the child on the phone. If the child needed to go to a doctor or dentist, I was called to go along to act as a translator,” Tsikhanouskaya, who worked as an English teacher and translator before she was thrust into politics ahead of the August 2020 election, recounted.
During her time in Ireland, Tsikhanouskaya had many opportunities to remain there, but said the pull of home was always too strong.
I was and still am very attached to my parents, to home, to those family ties,” she said, and at the time Ireland “just seemed far away” from home. “Now the borders are a bit more open; you get a Schengen visa and can travel at any time and return home. Back then, there were a lot more complications and at the time I picked my family, my parents, and my homeland.”
Written by RFE/RL Senior Correspondent Tony Wesolowsky based on reporting by Current Time Correspondent Alena Shalayeva
Former Chernobyl power plant worker Anna Shynkarenko remembers the confusion and delayed evacuation of families following the 1986 nuclear disaster in what was then the Soviet Union. She says she was initially kept in the dark about the seriousness of the worst-ever civilian nuclear accident and even worked her shift at the power plant the day after the disaster. When Shynkarenko, her husband, and three daughters were finally evacuated from their home in nearby Prypyat, they were all suffering from radiation-related illnesses. “Chernobyl took our childhood away,” said one of her daughters, “and it ruined normal life for you and Dad.”
Jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) is expected to face a preliminary court hearing into a move by Moscow prosecutors to label the group as “extremist” as the government continues to tighten the screws on the outspoken Kremlin critic’s supporters.
The FBK said in a tweet on April 26 that preliminary talks with the group related to the case will be held during the day, with an official hearing scheduled for April 29.
“The important thing is that we will never learn the details of the accusations against us. All of the evidence in the case has been classified as a state secret,” the FBK said.
The January arrest and subsequent imprisonment of Navalny on what are seen as trumped-up charges have worsened ties between Russia and the West, already strained by Moscow’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and the fomenting of separatism across much of Ukraine that helped to ignite a war that has killed more than 13,000 people in the Donbas, where Moscow-backed forces hold parts of two provinces.
The FBK has rattled the Kremlin over the years with its video investigations exposing the unexplained wealth of top officials, including President Vladimir Putin.
The latest move, initiated by the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office on April 16, seeks to have the Moscow City Court label the FBK and two other organizations tied to Navalny — the Citizens’ Rights Protection Foundation and Navalny’s regional headquarters — as “extremist” as they are “engaged in creating conditions for destabilizing the social and sociopolitical situation under the guise of their liberal slogans.”
The proposal was immediately condemned by international and domestic human rights groups, who say that if the Navalny’s organizations are officially recognized as “extremist,” all of their employees could face arrest and prison terms from six to 10 years.
Last week, almost 2,000 supporters of Navalny were arrested in nationwide protests aimed at pressuring officials to allow Navalny access to proper medical treatment as fears for his life rose as he entered the third week of a hunger strike he started over the medical attention he was receiving in prison.
On April 23, Navalny ended the hunger strike, saying he had “achieved enough,” though he continues to demand that he be examined by his personal doctors for acute pain in his back and legs.
Navalny was arrested on January 17 upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he had received life-saving treatment for a poisoning attack in Siberia in August.
He has insisted that his poisoning with a Soviet-style chemical nerve agent was ordered directly by Putin. 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.
Navalny’s 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from the case was converted to a prison term, though the court said he will serve 2 1/2 years in prison given time already served in detention.
The United States and European Union have imposed sanctions on Russia over the Navalny affair and the government’s crackdown on demonstrators earlier this year at rallies protesting Navalny’s arrest.
Photographer Olga Ivashchenko joined forestry workers helping Ukraine’s wild bison survive through the harsh winters of the Carpathian Mountains.
These are some of the wild bison that roam Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains, near the borders with Poland and Slovakia.
The bison are probably the descendants of animals brought to the area from Germany in 2009. European Bison were hunted to the edge of extinction a century ago, but have since made a steady comeback across the continent and in January they were removed from the list of Europe’s “vulnerable” animals.
The photos were taken by Ukrainian Olga Ivashchenko in February, when she joined a group who help the bison of the Carpathians survive Ukraine’s snow-clogged winters.
Ivashchenko rode with Vasyl Herych (pictured) and several other workers from Ukraine’s Skole Beskids National Park as they trucked food up to the mountain-roaming bison.
During the snowy months, when the foraging bison struggle to uncover enough to eat, these men haul supplies to the animals.
The men deliver hundreds of kilograms of beets, hay, and cabbage to an isolated spot that only four-wheel-drive trucks are able to reach.
The bisons’ food delivery is paid for by the Lviv regional government, as well as by donors that include the Frankfurt Zoological Society and the cosmetics company Lush. Without such help the animals would be more likely to wander down from the mountains in search of food and into contact with people.
The workers stand next to well-chewed hay bales in the area where the bison’s food is delivered.
European bison can eat up to 32 kilograms of food in a day. The animals find water themselves in winter, often by cracking through ice with their hooves.
The practice of people delivering food to wild bison through winters dates back several centuries, when bison were more common in the forests of Eastern Europe and some were under the protection of Europe’s royal families.
While Ivashchenko was with the men laying out food for the bison, a herd of the animals appeared out of the forest to watch their human benefactors — something the team told her happens rarely.
Ivashchenko told RFE/RL the foresters spotted the bison herd in the forest while driving. Herych then turned off the engine and the team quietly hopped out onto the snow.
A group of about 10 bison then watched the photographer as she cautiously approached the animals. “At that moment I felt vulnerable,” Ivashchenko says. “After all, I’m on their territory and they may not like it.” A European bison can weigh up to 1,000 kilograms.
The photographer says the only sound the animals made was the rustle of their hooves as they moved through the snow.
The population of European bison on the continent has increased from around 1,800 in 2003 to over 6,200 today. In Ukraine the population is slowly increasing and stands at about 350.
Ivashchenko says the small growth in numbers of Ukraine’s wild bison is largely “thanks to the people who look after them” in the country’s national parks.
Written by Amos Chapple based on reporting by Olga Ivashchenko
The 39-year-old son of Turkmenistan’s autocratic leader oversaw festivities surrounding a national holiday celebrating local horse and dog breeds, as speculation grows over potential hereditary succession in the secretive Central Asian state.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, 66, has appointed his son Serdar to a number of top positions this year, making him the second-most powerful figure in the country.
In a symbolic move earlier this month, Serdar replaced his father as head of the national horse association and was named “honored dog breeder of Turkmenistan.”
The local Akhal-Teke horse and Alabai sheepdog play a prominent role in state propaganda, with monuments in the capital Ashgabat devoted to them and untold funds spent on promoting their breeding.
Earlier this year, Berdymukhammedov ordered a national holiday for the Alabai to be celebrated on the last Sunday in April when the country marks the day of the Akhal-Teke horse.
In the past, President Berdymukhammedov led events surrounding the holiday at an elaborate horse track in Ashgabat, in some years participating in races, showing off his horseback skills, and handing out awards to breeders.
The Alabai sheepdog is revered in Turkmenistan.
For the first time on April 25, state television showed Serdar replace his father’s role in celebrating the Turkmen horse, which the media used in previous years to glorify the president.
It comes just days after Serdar topped the evening news for the first time as media showed him opening a state building housing associations that he heads promoting the Akhal-Teke horse and Alabai sheepdog.
Usually Turkmenistan’s evening news is entirely devoted to the latest activities of the president.
It’s unclear why the elder Berdymukhammedov has been taking a back seat in recent days, but it comes as he is mourning the death of his 89-year-old father, a former policeman and educator. That has added an additional layer of speculation that the autocratic leader may be thinking more about his legacy and succession.
In February, the younger Berdymukhammedov received three promotions, becoming deputy premier, a member of the powerful security council, and the auditor general.
Turkmenistan does not have a prime minister, with the elder Berdymukhammedov already president, speaker of the upper house of parliament, and head of government of a state built around his cult of personality.
With reporting by RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service and AFP
Russian President Vladimir Putin may hold a summit with his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden in June, a top Kremlin aide said on April 25.
Biden earlier this month proposed a face-to-face meeting with the Russian leader amid spiraling tensions between the two countries.
The Kremlin has suggested it views the summit offer positively and initial discussions with Washington are under way.
Putin’s top foreign policy aide, Yury Ushakov, said that a final decision on the meeting had not been made but it could happen in June.
“June is being named, there are even concrete dates,” Ushakov said on state-run television channel Rossiya-1.
“We will take a decision depending on many factors,” said Ushakov, a former Russian ambassador to the United States.
Separately on April 25, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the summit proposal has been “positively perceived and is being considered now.”
A June meeting could potentially coincide with Biden’s planned trip that month to Britain for a G7 summit and the NATO and EU summits in Brussels. The White House has said any Biden-Putin summit would likely be held in a neutral country in Europe, with both Austria and Finland expressing interest in hosting the two leaders.
Tensions between Russia and the United States have continued to worsen over the conflict in Ukraine, new sanctions on Moscow over alleged cyberattacks and election interference, the status of jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny, and a host of other issues.
In March, Russia was enraged after Biden agreed when asked in an interview if he thought Putin was a “killer,” prompting Moscow to recall its ambassador to Washington for consultations.
U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan returned to the United States this week for consultations after Moscow recommended that he temporarily leave.
That came as Russia this month declared 10 employees at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to be personae non gratae in what it called a “mirror” response to Washington’s expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats and wide-ranging sanctions as it moved to hold the Kremlin accountable for actions against the United States and its interests.
Biden has repeatedly stated that while he will be tough on Russia over any hostile policies, he is also seeking to cooperate where the two sides have mutual interests. This includes on such issues as nuclear proliferation, climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, North Korea, and fostering peace and stability in Afghanistan.
