Britain and the United States “firmly oppose Russia’s campaign to destabilize Ukraine” and call on Russia to de-escalate the situation, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken “& I agreed Russia must immediately de-escalate the situation & live up to the international commitments that it signed up to at @OSCE,” the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Raab said on Twitter.
Major movements of Russian armed forces toward or near Ukraine’s borders and into Russian-occupied Crimea have been captured in photographs, video, and other data, fueling concerns that Moscow may be preparing to send forces into eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin has rejected Western calls to pull back its troops, denying they are a threat while adding that military movements within Russia are a sovereign, internal issue.
The statement by Raab comes a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy briefed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the situation.
After their talks in Istanbul, Erdogan called recent developments “worrying” and said he hoped the conflict would be resolved peacefully through dialogue and in line with Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
“We believe that the current crisis can be solved with peaceful and diplomatic means on the basis of the integrity of Ukraine and international law,” Erdogan said.
During their meeting, the presidents also discussed expanding defense cooperation between their countries. Zelenskiy said the stepped-up cooperation would apply especially to weaponry and the construction of fighter jets.
Zelenskiy, who visited Ukrainians troops in the Donbas region on April 8, said Kyiv and Ankara shared the same view on threats in the Black Sea region and the response to those threats.
Washington has called Moscow’s military buildup “destabilizing,” and the White House has expressed concern about the recent troop movements.
U.S. Secretary of State Blinken consulted the German and French foreign ministers on April 9 about the need for Russia to cease its military buildup on the occupied Crimean Peninsula and near Ukraine’s eastern borders.
Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by at least 100 countries.
Since then, overwhelming evidence suggests Russia has continued to lend diplomatic and military aid to armed separatists fighting in the Donbas region.
The conflict has killed more than 13,000 people and displaced more than 1 million since April 2014.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan called for an end to what he described as “worrying” developments in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on April 10.
The meeting, which lasted more than three hours in Istanbul, was part of a previously scheduled visit but coincided with increased tensions between Kyiv and Moscow over the long-running conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Erdogan expressed his concern about the current fraught situation at a news conference alongside Zelenskiy, adding that he hoped the conflict would be resolved peacefully through dialogue and in line with Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Zelenskiy said Kyiv and Ankara share the same view on threats in the Black Sea region and the response to those threats.
Zelenskiy, who visited troops in the Donbas region two days ago, said he had briefed Erdogan on the situation in detail.
Major movements of Russian armed forces toward or near Ukraine’s borders and into Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula have been captured in photographs, video, and other data, fueling concerns that Moscow may be preparing to send forces into eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin has rejected Western calls to pull back its troops, denying they are a threat while adding that military movements within Russia are an internal sovereign issue.
Washington has called Moscow’s military buildup “destabilizing,” and the White House has expressed concern about the recent troop movements.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken consulted the German and French foreign ministers on April 9 about the need for Russia to cease its military buildup in the occupied Crimean Peninsula and near Ukraine’s eastern borders.
Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by at least 100 countries.
Since then, overwhelming evidence suggests Russia has continued to lend diplomatic and military aid to armed separatists fighting in the Donbas region.
The conflict has killed more than 13,000 people and displaced more than 1 million since April 2014.
Members of the German Bundestag have described the treatment of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny as “targeted torture” and demanded the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture review the conditions of his detention.
The letter, posted on Facebook on April 10, called Navalny’s treatment “incompatible” with the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture, saying Russia is a party to the convention as a member of the Council of Europe.
The letter is signed by Manuel Sarrazin, with Germany’s Green Party, and a bipartisan group of 11 other members of the Bundestag, the lower house in Germany’s parliament. It was made available on Sarrazin’s Facebook page in German and Russian.
“Notwithstanding the arbitrariness and illegality of the judgments pronounced against you, we demand a review of your conditions of detention by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture,” the politicians said.
The lawmakers said they believe the legal process against him was not carried out under the standards of rule of law and consider the judgment politically motivated and arbitrary with the goal of silencing him.
They said they were following reports about his imprisonment and health condition with great concern and expressed their “full solidarity” with him.
Navalny was imprisoned after returning to Russia in January from his recuperation in Germany after his exposure to a nerve agent last August in Siberia. He has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering security agents to assassinate him, something the Kremlin denies.
Navalny was treated in Germany after the poisoning, and Sarrazin said that he had the impression that Navalny’s treatment was meant to reverse his partial recovery.
Navalny has complained of back pain and numbness in his hands and legs and accused the authorities of withholding adequate medical treatment.
Navalny declared a hunger strike last week, raising even more concerns about his overall health.
Attorneys for Navalny, 44, said after visiting him on April 8 that he was suffering from two herniated disks in his back and a third bulging disk, and said he is losing about 1 kilogram a day.
VORKUTA, Russia — In May 1931, a group of 39 prisoners toiling in the Soviet Union’s expanding network of forced labor camps set off north from the town of Ukhta to explore the vast coal basin in the Russian Arctic.
Joined by a team of geologists and camp guards, the men traveled for weeks through barely navigable waters and icy tundra into the frigid, inhospitable region that would test the limits of the lauded Soviet conquest of the Far North.
They were soon joined by more prisoners, hundreds of whom died from sickness, hypothermia, and starvation. But by the spring of 1932, they founded Rudnik, a small coal-mining settlement 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle that would soon grow into the city of Vorkuta.
It had been a barren, forbidding terrain known only to indigenous Nenets reindeer herders; within a decade, it hosted one of the deadliest Gulag camps in the Soviet Union, and after Stalin’s death in 1953, a burgeoning metropolis that would be upheld as a symbol of Soviet power.
Central Vorkuta as it looks today.
But close to a century after its founding, a city whose population approached 250,000 in the late 1980s now has fewer than 60,000 residents and is shrinking faster than any other in Russia. The communist slogans that adorn its buildings, promising a bright future, endure as symbols of the chasm between the utopian vision of the U.S.S.R. and its capacity to turn that vision into reality.
‘Widespread Abandonment’
“We all had an understanding in high school that we’d graduate and leave this place,” says Anastasia Sadvary, a 33-year-old legal consultant who was born in Rudnik and now divides her time between Vorkuta and Syktyvkar, the capital of the surrounding Komi Region, some 900 kilometers further south. “Now most of my friends have left, and I’m an exception to the rule.”
Anastasia Sadvary
At its peak, Vorkuta was the geographical hub of a sprawling network of 13 coal mines that encircled the city like the hour indicators of an enormous clock, spawning vibrant settlements complete with schools, kindergartens, stores, medical clinics and cultural centers.
Today, only four of the 13 coal mines remain, and many of the settlements have become ghost towns along the highway connecting their once-thriving communities with the city.
A cargo train transports coal from the Vorgashorskaya mine, one of just four remaining around Vorkuta.
In the untrammeled capitalism that replaced the planned Soviet economy, the coal business struggled, the rate of deadly accidents grew, and the mines closed one by one, leaving behind derelict villages whose inhabitants moved to Vorkuta or, if they could, to Russia’s warmer regions. The latest mine shuttered in 2016 after a methane gas leak triggered explosions that claimed 36 lives.
“What we see now, 30 years after the Soviet collapse, is the drawn-out death of Vorkuta,” said Alan Barenberg, a historian at Texas Tech University and author of Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor And Its Legacy In Vorkuta. “It’s no longer an ideological imperative to prove to the world that maintaining a coal-mining city of 250,000 people in the Arctic is a triumph of Soviet ingenuity — so you see the widespread abandonment of settlements and mines, with more surely to come.”
“More Coal For The Motherland!” is the communist-era slogan emblazoned atop the headquarters of the Vorkutaugol mining company in central Vorkuta.
Life in Vorkuta isn’t for the faint-hearted, with average temperatures of -5 degrees Celsius and winters that last up to 10 months. No roads connect the city to the rest of Russia, meaning it’s reachable year-round only via rail or, from April to October, by flights that are frequently delayed due to blizzards and strong winds.
Vorkuta now has the dubious honor of offering the cheapest housing of any Russian city, with three-room apartments frequently going for as little as $1,000. And the exorbitant cost of utilities like water and electricity means it’s sometimes more cost-effective to give your apartment away for free than wait months or years for a buyer.
The abandoned prisoner-built settlement of Rudnik is today only reachable from Vorkuta via a rickety wooden bridge that’s missing most of its wooden planks.
The situation is far worse in the coal-mining settlements around Vorkuta. Inside their deserted five-story housing blocks, apartment doors swivel on creaky hinges as if beckoning visitors to explore the possessions left strewn across the floor by owners who chose a swift departure over the protracted ordeal of gambling on the moribund housing market.
‘Every Man For Himself’
Outside the entrances to these apartment blocks, chalk lettering redolent of wartime signs by air-raid survivors denotes stairwells that still have at least one inhabitant, for whose benefit that entire stairwell’s central heating system is kept on.
According to official figures, there are 15,500 empty apartments in Vorkuta and surrounding settlements, a third of which are connected to the grid at an annual cost of 570 million rubles ($7.4 million) to the state budget.
Igor Krutko, one of the few remaining residents in the village of Komsomolsky.
“The Soviet Union valued such places,” says Igor Krutko, a 57-year-old living in Komsomolsky, a village 22 kilometers from Vorkuta that once had 20,000 inhabitants and now has a mere 200, with a tiny grocery shop as their only means of sustenance in a place left for the elements to slowly devour. “Today we have Wild West capitalism — every man for himself.”
In 1993, during the traumatic years after the Soviet collapse when rampant wage arrears drove depopulation from remote areas like Vorkuta, President Boris Yeltsin signed legislation that guaranteed free resettlement for retired long-time residents of the Far North.
A street in Komsomolsky, a coal-mining village that once had 20,000 inhabitants and now has just 200.
But the program has all but ground to a halt. Approximately 15,000 people in Vorkuta are eligible for resettlement, but only around 250 families across the whole of the vast Komi Region are moved each year.
“They’re holding us hostage,” says Vladimir Zharuk, a 60-year-old ex-miner with thick forearms and boundless energy who moved from his native Ukraine in the 1970s and now lives in Vorgashor village, beside a still-operative coal mine that was Europe’s largest when it opened in 1975.
Vladimir Zharuk at his apartment in Vorgashor village.
Zharuk, who collects a monthly pension of 25,000 rubles ($325), has been on the list for relocation since 1997, and says he is somewhere around spot 6,000 — which, by his calculations, means he’d need to wait another 120 years for his turn if the glacial pace of resettlement continues. Faced with the realistic prospect of never leaving Vorgashor, he devotes his energy to aiding other stranded retirees as part of a civic organization he calls Hostages of the Far North.
‘It Makes My Heart Bleed’
In the meantime, he has watched the village around him gradually turn to ruin, with the only community center closed two years ago despite protests from remaining residents. “Vorgashor will fight to the bitter end,” he says. “But it makes my heart bleed to see what’s taking place.”
To understand why Krutko and Zharuk decided to settle in Vorkuta in the first place, one must understand what the city once represented. After Stalin’s death, thousands of ex-prisoners of the crumbling Gulag system left, and amid a scramble to replace the workforce at the mines, authorities in Vorkuta lured recruits with salaries that were often five times the Soviet average, and generous bonuses that provided for free summer vacations in Crimea and a comfortable early retirement.
A playroom inside Vorgashor’s former House of Culture, which closed two years ago amid protests from locals.
Driven by an influx of workers attracted by these packages, Vorkuta soon became a showpiece Soviet city. It boasted grand neoclassical buildings whose foundations were sunk meters into the ground to prevent them from collapsing into the thawing permafrost, and panel housing blocks that sprang up like mushrooms, sometimes taking as few as 16 days to complete and displaying bold slogans like “More Coal For The Motherland!” and “Glory to the Conquerors of the Arctic!”
Possessions left strewn inside the living room of an abandoned apartment in Komsomolsky that is still connected to the central heating system.
For a tiny fraction of their monthly salary, miners like Zharuk and Krutko could purchase tickets on one of six daily flights to Moscow, spending two days at a time wandering the streets of the grand Soviet capital before making it back to Vorkuta for the Monday shift.
“Vorkuta was a unique city. So many interesting and intelligent people congregated here,” said Mikhail Tverskoi, an 88-year-old former mining engineer who at the age of 36 left a cramped communal apartment in St. Petersburg and accepted an offer to work in Vorkuta — with the three-bedroom apartment and all the privileges that came with the position.
Watching a technical rehearsal in the main auditorium of the Miners’ Palace of Culture in Vorkuta.
More than half a century later, it’s not all doom and gloom. Vorkuta may be a shadow of its former self, but it retains a combative, feisty energy and a city center that even during the polar darkness in December is filled with young mothers pushing ski-equipped strollers that glide across the snow faster than the children trudging to and from school in hats and gloves.
A dance class inside the Miners’ Palace of Culture, which was built in 1961 to showcase Vorkuta’s growing status as a model Soviet city in the Arctic.
Inside the spectacular Miners’ Palace of Culture, built in 1961, ballet and dance classes take place each evening and volleyball matches are played in the top-floor sports hall.
A trickle of labor migrants from Central Asia in recent years has slightly offset the exodus from Vorkuta, and amid the coronavirus pandemic, a small number of former residents has returned after losing jobs in other cities.
‘No Coal, No City’
Russia has sought ways to develop the Arctic, a task that will become easier as global warming accelerates. But an estimated 1 million people have left its Arctic zone since the Soviet collapse, and depopulation is cited as a major obstacle to the plans. A land giveaway program launched in Russia’s Far East will be expanded to the Arctic this summer — but even in more fertile climes it has hardly proved a hit.
“I’m absolutely convinced this city will survive. It will shrink further, but it will survive,” said Tverskoi. He hopes Vorkuta will escape the fate of other Soviet single-industry towns by tapping anew its abundant natural resources. But he warns: “If there’s no coal, there’s no city.”
On a recent visit to Rudnik, the abandoned prisoner-built settlement that gave rise to Vorkuta and is now only accessible via a rickety bridge missing most of its wooden planks, Sadvary, the legal consultant, pointed out the probable location of her childhood home — a wooden barracks that her family heated with coal brought home by her father from the mines.
Wooden crosses outside the city indicate the burial places of 42 prisoners killed during an uprising at a Vorkuta forced labor camp in 1953.
In 2006, she married a local man in a ceremony that culminated with raucous festivities at Vorkuta’s Ural Restaurant, once a popular venue for revelers.
Today, her childhood home is gone, and her wedding venue is a hollowed-out wreck.
Rudnik, the mining settlement that was established by Gulag prisoners in 1932 and gave rise to the city of Vorkuta, is now a haven for Airsoft enthusiasts.
“I look at all this and see our future,” she said, gazing at the six-story buildings that have become a haven for Airsoft enthusiasts. “This city only exists for the extraction of natural resources. Once they’re gone, the city will go. And they’ll have the perfect setting for movies about the zombie apocalypse.”
VORKUTA, Russia — In May 1931, a group of 39 prisoners toiling in the Soviet Union’s expanding network of forced labor camps set off north from the town of Ukhta to explore the vast coal basin in the Russian Arctic.
Joined by a team of geologists and camp guards, the men traveled for weeks through barely navigable waters and icy tundra into the frigid, inhospitable region that would test the limits of the lauded Soviet conquest of the Far North.
They were soon joined by more prisoners, hundreds of whom died from sickness, hypothermia, and starvation. But by the spring of 1932, they founded Rudnik, a small coal-mining settlement 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle that would soon grow into the city of Vorkuta.
It had been a barren, forbidding terrain known only to indigenous Nenets reindeer herders; within a decade, it hosted one of the deadliest Gulag camps in the Soviet Union, and after Stalin’s death in 1953, a burgeoning metropolis that would be upheld as a symbol of Soviet power.
Central Vorkuta as it looks today.
But close to a century after its founding, a city whose population approached 250,000 in the late 1980s now has fewer than 60,000 residents and is shrinking faster than any other in Russia. The communist slogans that adorn its buildings, promising a bright future, endure as symbols of the chasm between the utopian vision of the U.S.S.R. and its capacity to turn that vision into reality.
‘Widespread Abandonment’
“We all had an understanding in high school that we’d graduate and leave this place,” says Anastasia Sadvary, a 33-year-old legal consultant who was born in Rudnik and now divides her time between Vorkuta and Syktyvkar, the capital of the surrounding Komi Region, some 900 kilometers further south. “Now most of my friends have left, and I’m an exception to the rule.”
Anastasia Sadvary
At its peak, Vorkuta was the geographical hub of a sprawling network of 13 coal mines that encircled the city like the hour indicators of an enormous clock, spawning vibrant settlements complete with schools, kindergartens, stores, medical clinics and cultural centers.
Today, only four of the 13 coal mines remain, and many of the settlements have become ghost towns along the highway connecting their once-thriving communities with the city.
A cargo train transports coal from the Vorgashorskaya mine, one of just four remaining around Vorkuta.
In the untrammeled capitalism that replaced the planned Soviet economy, the coal business struggled, the rate of deadly accidents grew, and the mines closed one by one, leaving behind derelict villages whose inhabitants moved to Vorkuta or, if they could, to Russia’s warmer regions. The latest mine shuttered in 2016 after a methane gas leak triggered explosions that claimed 36 lives.
“What we see now, 30 years after the Soviet collapse, is the drawn-out death of Vorkuta,” said Alan Barenberg, a historian at Texas Tech University and author of Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor And Its Legacy In Vorkuta. “It’s no longer an ideological imperative to prove to the world that maintaining a coal-mining city of 250,000 people in the Arctic is a triumph of Soviet ingenuity — so you see the widespread abandonment of settlements and mines, with more surely to come.”
“More Coal For The Motherland!” is the communist-era slogan emblazoned atop the headquarters of the Vorkutaugol mining company in central Vorkuta.
Life in Vorkuta isn’t for the faint-hearted, with average temperatures of -5 degrees Celsius and winters that last up to 10 months. No roads connect the city to the rest of Russia, meaning it’s reachable year-round only via rail or, from April to October, by flights that are frequently delayed due to blizzards and strong winds.
Vorkuta now has the dubious honor of offering the cheapest housing of any Russian city, with three-room apartments frequently going for as little as $1,000. And the exorbitant cost of utilities like water and electricity means it’s sometimes more cost-effective to give your apartment away for free than wait months or years for a buyer.
The abandoned prisoner-built settlement of Rudnik is today only reachable from Vorkuta via a rickety wooden bridge that’s missing most of its wooden planks.
The situation is far worse in the coal-mining settlements around Vorkuta. Inside their deserted five-story housing blocks, apartment doors swivel on creaky hinges as if beckoning visitors to explore the possessions left strewn across the floor by owners who chose a swift departure over the protracted ordeal of gambling on the moribund housing market.
‘Every Man For Himself’
Outside the entrances to these apartment blocks, chalk lettering redolent of wartime signs by air-raid survivors denotes stairwells that still have at least one inhabitant, for whose benefit that entire stairwell’s central heating system is kept on.
According to official figures, there are 15,500 empty apartments in Vorkuta and surrounding settlements, a third of which are connected to the grid at an annual cost of 570 million rubles ($7.4 million) to the state budget.
Igor Krutko, one of the few remaining residents in the village of Komsomolsky.
“The Soviet Union valued such places,” says Igor Krutko, a 57-year-old living in Komsomolsky, a village 22 kilometers from Vorkuta that once had 20,000 inhabitants and now has a mere 200, with a tiny grocery shop as their only means of sustenance in a place left for the elements to slowly devour. “Today we have Wild West capitalism — every man for himself.”
In 1993, during the traumatic years after the Soviet collapse when rampant wage arrears drove depopulation from remote areas like Vorkuta, President Boris Yeltsin signed legislation that guaranteed free resettlement for retired long-time residents of the Far North.
A street in Komsomolsky, a coal-mining village that once had 20,000 inhabitants and now has just 200.
But the program has all but ground to a halt. Approximately 15,000 people in Vorkuta are eligible for resettlement, but only around 250 families across the whole of the vast Komi Region are moved each year.
“They’re holding us hostage,” says Vladimir Zharuk, a 60-year-old ex-miner with thick forearms and boundless energy who moved from his native Ukraine in the 1970s and now lives in Vorgashor village, beside a still-operative coal mine that was Europe’s largest when it opened in 1975.
Vladimir Zharuk at his apartment in Vorgashor village.
Zharuk, who collects a monthly pension of 25,000 rubles ($325), has been on the list for relocation since 1997, and says he is somewhere around spot 6,000 — which, by his calculations, means he’d need to wait another 120 years for his turn if the glacial pace of resettlement continues. Faced with the realistic prospect of never leaving Vorgashor, he devotes his energy to aiding other stranded retirees as part of a civic organization he calls Hostages of the Far North.
‘It Makes My Heart Bleed’
In the meantime, he has watched the village around him gradually turn to ruin, with the only community center closed two years ago despite protests from remaining residents. “Vorgashor will fight to the bitter end,” he says. “But it makes my heart bleed to see what’s taking place.”
To understand why Krutko and Zharuk decided to settle in Vorkuta in the first place, one must understand what the city once represented. After Stalin’s death, thousands of ex-prisoners of the crumbling Gulag system left, and amid a scramble to replace the workforce at the mines, authorities in Vorkuta lured recruits with salaries that were often five times the Soviet average, and generous bonuses that provided for free summer vacations in Crimea and a comfortable early retirement.
A playroom inside Vorgashor’s former House of Culture, which closed two years ago amid protests from locals.
Driven by an influx of workers attracted by these packages, Vorkuta soon became a showpiece Soviet city. It boasted grand neoclassical buildings whose foundations were sunk meters into the ground to prevent them from collapsing into the thawing permafrost, and panel housing blocks that sprang up like mushrooms, sometimes taking as few as 16 days to complete and displaying bold slogans like “More Coal For The Motherland!” and “Glory to the Conquerors of the Arctic!”
Possessions left strewn inside the living room of an abandoned apartment in Komsomolsky that is still connected to the central heating system.
For a tiny fraction of their monthly salary, miners like Zharuk and Krutko could purchase tickets on one of six daily flights to Moscow, spending two days at a time wandering the streets of the grand Soviet capital before making it back to Vorkuta for the Monday shift.
“Vorkuta was a unique city. So many interesting and intelligent people congregated here,” said Mikhail Tverskoi, an 88-year-old former mining engineer who at the age of 36 left a cramped communal apartment in St. Petersburg and accepted an offer to work in Vorkuta — with the three-bedroom apartment and all the privileges that came with the position.
Watching a technical rehearsal in the main auditorium of the Miners’ Palace of Culture in Vorkuta.
More than half a century later, it’s not all doom and gloom. Vorkuta may be a shadow of its former self, but it retains a combative, feisty energy and a city center that even during the polar darkness in December is filled with young mothers pushing ski-equipped strollers that glide across the snow faster than the children trudging to and from school in hats and gloves.
A dance class inside the Miners’ Palace of Culture, which was built in 1961 to showcase Vorkuta’s growing status as a model Soviet city in the Arctic.
Inside the spectacular Miners’ Palace of Culture, built in 1961, ballet and dance classes take place each evening and volleyball matches are played in the top-floor sports hall.
A trickle of labor migrants from Central Asia in recent years has slightly offset the exodus from Vorkuta, and amid the coronavirus pandemic, a small number of former residents has returned after losing jobs in other cities.
‘No Coal, No City’
Russia has sought ways to develop the Arctic, a task that will become easier as global warming accelerates. But an estimated 1 million people have left its Arctic zone since the Soviet collapse, and depopulation is cited as a major obstacle to the plans. A land giveaway program launched in Russia’s Far East will be expanded to the Arctic this summer — but even in more fertile climes it has hardly proved a hit.
“I’m absolutely convinced this city will survive. It will shrink further, but it will survive,” said Tverskoi. He hopes Vorkuta will escape the fate of other Soviet single-industry towns by tapping anew its abundant natural resources. But he warns: “If there’s no coal, there’s no city.”
On a recent visit to Rudnik, the abandoned prisoner-built settlement that gave rise to Vorkuta and is now only accessible via a rickety bridge missing most of its wooden planks, Sadvary, the legal consultant, pointed out the probable location of her childhood home — a wooden barracks that her family heated with coal brought home by her father from the mines.
Wooden crosses outside the city indicate the burial places of 42 prisoners killed during an uprising at a Vorkuta forced labor camp in 1953.
In 2006, she married a local man in a ceremony that culminated with raucous festivities at Vorkuta’s Ural Restaurant, once a popular venue for revelers.
Today, her childhood home is gone, and her wedding venue is a hollowed-out wreck.
Rudnik, the mining settlement that was established by Gulag prisoners in 1932 and gave rise to the city of Vorkuta, is now a haven for Airsoft enthusiasts.
“I look at all this and see our future,” she said, gazing at the six-story buildings that have become a haven for Airsoft enthusiasts. “This city only exists for the extraction of natural resources. Once they’re gone, the city will go. And they’ll have the perfect setting for movies about the zombie apocalypse.”
With a new Cold War heating up between the U.S. and Russia and China, Witness for Peace Southwest, Addicted to War and CodePink organized a Truth Commission on the original Cold War on March 21st, which brought together the testimony of historians, activists and others who lived through the period.
Following a hearing three years ago, the Zoom event was hosted by Frank Dorrel, publisher of the popular anti-war text Addicted to War, and Rachel Bruhnke, a high school Spanish teacher and member of Witness for Peace Southwest. In her opening remarks, Bruhnke emphasized that the Cold War should rank as one of three great crimes in U.S. history, the first two being the genocide of the native Americans, and enslavement of African-Americans.
A British coroner has determined that an exiled Russian critic of President Vladimir Putin was strangled to death by “a third party” at his home in a southwest suburb of London.
Self-exiled Russian businessman Nikolai Glushkov was found dead at his home in New Malden, England, in March 2018.
Senior coroner Chinyere Inyama ruled that Glushkov was “unlawfully killed” after the West London Coroner’s Court heard evidence suggesting his death was made to look like a suicide and that there had been “third-party involvement.”
Glushkov fled Russia after authorities accused him of fraud during his time as deputy director of the state-owned Aeroflot airline.
He was granted political asylum in the United Kingdom in 2010.
He had been a close friend of the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, also a vocal critic of Putin, who was found hanged at his home west of London in 2013.
In 2017, during Glushkov’s trial in absentia, a Russian court convicted him of stealing about $120 million from Aeroflot. It sentenced him to eight years in prison.
Glushkov had been due to appear at the Commercial Court in London to defend himself on March 12, 2018 — the day his body was discovered by his daughter, Natalia.
His death came a week after the Novichok poisoning in Salisbury, England, of the Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
‘Unlawful Killing’
A pathology report presented to the West London Coroner’s Court said Glushkov’s injuries “could be consistent with a neck-hold, applied from behind, and the assailant being behind the victim.”
The pathology report said: “There is a lack of injuries to suggest prolonged grappling or restraint with the third party, and a lack of injuries of a defensive nature to the upper limbs.”
The coroner’s verdict said: “From all the documentation, all the evidence gathered, Nikolai Glushkov died from an unlawful killing.”
British detectives are renewing an appeal for witnesses who were in the New Malden area on March 11-12, 2018.
The inquest coincides with a renewed appeal by London’s Met Police counterterrorism unit for more information about Glushkov’s death.
Commander Richard Smith says more than 1,800 potential witnesses have been contacted and more than 420 statements taken.
London police say no arrests have been made and a motive for the killing has not yet been established.
Poland has commemorated the 11th anniversary of a plane crash near the Russian city of Smolensk that killed 96 people — including Poland’s then-President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and many of the country’s senior political and military officials.
Many Poles, including senior members of the governing Law and Justice Party, question the results of an investigation released in 2011 by a special Polish commission.
It concluded the Tu-154 military flight from Warsaw had crashed on April 10, 2010, in extreme fog on its approach to an airport near Smolensk because of pilot error and a lack of warnings from Smolensk air-traffic controllers.
Poles are also suspicious of Russia’s handling of the investigation.
The current Polish president, Andrzej Duda, has noted that while Russia turned over data from the plane’s flight recorders that it deemed relevant to the case, “the wreckage is still in Russia; the black boxes are still in Russia.”
The late president’s twin brother, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has said he suspects the crash was the result of an assassination plot by the Russians.
The tragedy has strained relations with Russia, all the more so because the plane had been traveling to commemorate the World War II Katyn massacre of some 22,000 Polish military officers and civilian intelligentsia by Soviet secret police.
Events commemorating the plane crash on April 10 began in the morning with a Roman Catholic religious service and the laying of wreaths at a monument dedicated to the victims of the crash and at their graves.
An evening religious service was also scheduled in a Warsaw cathedral.
For the second consecutive year, the commemorations took place amid coronavirus restrictions and were limited in scope.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki described the crash in a Facebook post on April 10 as “the biggest national tragedy in Poland’s postwar history.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was due on April 10 to embark on a series of overseas meetings with U.S. allies amid rising tensions between Ukraine and Russia and what Washington calls Moscow’s “destabilizing behavior.”
During the week ahead, Austin is due to meet with government and military leaders in Israel, Germany, at NATO Headquarters in Belgium, and in the United Kingdom. .
A Pentagon statement late on April 8 said Austin will “meet with his counterparts and other senior officials to discuss the importance of international defense relationships, and reinforce the United States’ commitment to deterrence and defense, burden sharing, and enduring trans-Atlantic security.”
The Pentagon says Austin’s April 14 meeting in Brussels with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will focus on “how the Alliance is tackling destabilizing behavior by Russia,” as well as “rising China, terrorism, and global challenges such as COVID-19 and climate change.”
Ahead of that meeting, Austin was scheduled to visit in Berlin with German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and Chancellery Foreign and Security Policy Adviser Jan Hecker.
The Pentagon says the agenda of Austin’s Berlin talks include “combatting the malign influence of our shared strategic rivals, and continued dialogue on U.S. force posture in Germany and elsewhere.”
Austin’s tour starts a day after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken consulted the German and French foreign ministers about the need for Russia to cease its military buildup in the occupied Crimean Peninsula and near Ukraine’s eastern borders.
Washington has accused Russia of “provocations” in eastern Ukraine and using “inflammatory rhetoric.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (file photo)
A statement from the U.S. State Department said Blinken spoke separately with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian about the need for stepped-up consultations among NATO allies as fears grow of a major escalation in the eastern Ukraine conflict.
Kyiv and the West blame the Russia-backed separatists holding parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions for a recent spike in hostilities, while Moscow has pointed the finger at Kyiv.
A recent accumulation of photographs, video, and other data has revealed major movements of Russian armed forces toward or near Ukraine’s borders and into Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula.
That has fueled concerns that Moscow may be preparing to send forces into eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin has rejected Western calls to pull back its troops, denying they are a threat while adding that military movements within Russia are an internal sovereign issue.
On April 9, the Kremlin issued a stark warning that Russia could take steps to “protect civilians” in the region in the event of a resumption of full-scale combat operations there.
The first stop on Austin’s four-country tour is Israel where he is to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Benjamin Gantz.
The final item on Austin’s agenda, after visiting NATO headquarters in Brussels, is talks in the United Kingdom with Secretary of State for Defense Ben Wallace.
The Pentagon says the purpose of that visit is “to reaffirm the continuing importance of U.S.-United Kingdom defense cooperation to meet global security challenges.”
Russian security agents have searched the home of one of the country’s most prominent investigative journalists and brought him in for interrogation, in what his lawyer and editorial team said was related to coverage of one of Russia’s most powerful men.
After FSB security agents searched his Moscow apartmenton April 9, Istories editor-in-chief Roman Anin was taken to the Investigative Committee in connection with enquiries into “violation of privacy by abusing his professional functions,” his lawyer Anna Stavitskaya said.
Istories reported on its Telegram channelthat the last thing they heard from Anin was that the search may be related to a previous case opened in 2016, after Anin published a report in Novaya Gazeta newspaper suggesting state-owned oil giant Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin had links to a yacht valued at $100 million.
Anin had previously worked for Novaya Gazeta, the most prominent opposition newspaper. The newspaper was found guilty of defamation after Sechin filed a complaint about the report.
In a statement,Novaya Gazeta’s editorial board said the case was reopened in March after Rosneft filed a claim against Istories.
“Everything that is happening now with Roman Anin is revenge,” the editorial board said. “We will by all legal means and publicly protect our friend and colleague.”
The move against Anin comes just weeks after he published an investigative piece suggesting the new deputy head of the FSB, Sergei Korolev, has ties with the leaders of several Russian organized criminal groups.
Created last year, Istories specializes in investigative reports, including recent articles on FSB officers surveilling imprisoned opposition leader Alexsei Navalny and an exposé into the wealth of former son-in-law of President Vladimir Putin, Kirill Shamalov.
With reporting by AFP, RFE/RL’s Russian Service, and Novaya Gazeta
MOSCOW — “I have trouble breathing. I can’t catch my breath and have trouble understanding things,” said businessman Boris Shpigel, who is suspected of bribing the former governor of Russia’s Penza region, at a court hearing on April 6. “I’m in great pain…. My stomach hurts and I can’t catch my breath.”
“I don’t have long left, a few days,” Shpigel, 68, predicted. “I haven’t slept for six days because I can’t find a comfortable position. I hurt all over and my right leg is numb…. Every day is torture for me. I can’t take anymore. I can’t stand it.”
Such allegations are nothing new for Russia’s opaque prison system. For years, activists, lawyers, and former prisoners, have drawn attention to the poor quality of medical care in Russian prisons and pretrial detention centers and have alleged that, in many cases, medical treatment is withheld to pressure suspects, to extract false confessions or accusations, or simply as a form of punishment.
“As for medical care overall, often a prison will only have a paramedic and no real schedule for when specialists will visit,” said Asmik Novikova, director of research at the nongovernmental legal aid organization Public Verdict. “This is, of course, a very serious problem.”
‘Deliberate Campaign’
Now attention across Russia and around the world has turned to the plight of opposition political leader Aleksei Navalny, who is serving 2 1/2 years at a prison in the town of Pokrov in the Vladimir region based on a conviction that he says was politically motivated. Navalny and his attorneys have alleged that he is being subjected to a “deliberate campaign” to undermine his health.
He has said he has two herniated disks and is losing sensation in his arms and legs. His lawyers have said Navalny has not fully recovered from a nerve-agent poisoning that nearly killed him in August and that he blames on Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives working at the behest of President Vladimir Putin.
Navalny has lost 13 kilograms since his imprisonment and continues a hunger strike aimed at forcing prison officials to allow him to be treated by his own doctor.
In addition, Navalny has said at least three prisoners in his ward have been diagnosed with tuberculosis and he himself was moved to the prison sick ward on April 5 with symptoms of respiratory illness.
Prison authorities have said they were monitoring Navalny’s health, which they evaluated as “satisfactory.”
Asmik Novikova from the Public Verdict legal aid organization. (file photo)
Novikova said there is no real way of finding out what the real situation is in the prison where Navalny is being held because “all information about what goes on in prisons is monopolized” by the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN).
“We have to settle for whatever they indicate from time to time in public records,” she said. “But from what I am seeing, it’s clear there is basically no medical help there.”
Despite Navalny’s high public profile, his story is all-too-familiar to prisoners’ rights advocates, said Oleg Dubrovkin, who spent 24 years in Russian prisons and now works at the Prisoners’ Rights Defense Foundation. He says assisting prisoners who complain of health and health-care issues is one of his main duties.
‘Mechanism For Pressuring Inmates’
The prison system, he said, has strict rules for the provision of medical care, but they are applied chaotically.
“Whether or not they are applied in the institution where Navalny is being held, I don’t know,” he told RFE/RL. “To me all the prisoners are the same, whether it is Navalny or just some average Petrov. It doesn’t matter.”
Sergei Shunin is a lawyer for the NGO Committee Against Torture who formerly served on a public oversight commission (ONK) that theoretically is able to inspect and monitor prisons, agrees that the opacity of the prison system is a major problem that could conceal many others.
“In my experience, I have seen many complaints from prisoners who say that people suffering from tuberculosis have been placed in their wards,” Shunin said. “They often believe that this is done to pressure them and that the refusal to provide medical care is often a mechanism for pressuring inmates.”
A still image from CCTV footage published by Life.Ru shows what is said to be Aleksei Navalny (center) speaking with a guard in a prison ward at Correctional Colony No. 2, about 100 kilometers from Moscow.
“It’s impossible for me to evaluate the situation with Aleksei Navalny,” he added. “As a lawyer and as a former ONK member, I have to proceed from facts. The first thing I would do would be to examine his medical file and speak with the doctors. As far as I understand, the members of the Vladimir region ONK have not done this and that itself is rather strange.”
Shunin adds that a persistent problem for Russia has been the lack of qualified medical personnel in the prison system, which he argues is caused primarily by the low wages they are paid.
“A doctor in a prison, as I have been told, earns about 10,000 rubles ($130) a month, including bonuses,” he said. “With wages like that, this problem isn’t going to go away and, unfortunately, no one is doing anything about it.”
Shunin said the most common complaint he dealt with during his ONK service from 2016 to 2019 was about the lack of medical care.
Yevgeny Yenikeyev served on an ONK commission in Moscow and he told RFE/RL that the prison’s refusal to allow Navalny to consult a private physician was illegal.
“Under the law, any civilian doctor can come to a prison at the request of an inmate,” Yenikeyev said. “However, only a prison doctor can order an inmate’s transfer to a civilian hospital, since that requires a special escort and additional labor. But when the doctor is ready to come to the prison at his or her own expense and there are no additional costs, then it must happen if the prisoner desires it.”
“In the case of Aleksei Navalny, the refusal to allow him to be examined by a doctor is illegal,” he added. “We can talk forever about the motives for the prison administration’s refusal. It is very hard to know what is going on in their heads.”
On March 26, when Navalny’s health complaints were becoming increasingly serious, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed them out of hand and added: “We don’t know about any systemic problems in the Federal Penitentiary Service.”
The same day, Navalny posted on Instagram that he had once been given prison tips from former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who served a decade in Russian jails and prisons from his arrest in 2003 to his release under pardon in December 2013.
“He told me the main thing is not to get sick,” Navalny wrote. “No one is going to treat you. If you fall seriously ill, you will die.”
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting from Moscow by Current Time correspondent Igor Sevryugin and RFE/RL Russian Service correspondents Lyubov Chizhova and Alya Ponomaryova.
A court in Moscow has sentenced a man to 3 1/2 years in prison on a criminal charge of attacking a police officer during January 31 rallies in support of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny.
The Meshchansky district court on April 9 found Pavel Grin-Romanov guilty of using pepper spray against a police officer during the dispersal of the demonstrators.
Grin-Romanov pleaded “partially guilty” admitting he sprayed the pepper spray in the direction of the riot police but did so to protect his wife who was with him.
Prosecutors sought eight years in prison for the defendant.
Grin-Romanov is one of several people who were handed prison terms or suspended sentences in recent weeks for attacking police during the nationwide demonstrations held on January 23 and January 31 against the arrest of the Kremlin critic.
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 time he had been held in detention.
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 misdeeds and several have been fired by their employers.
With reporting by Novaya gazeta, Meduza, and Mediazona
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is calling on Russia to stop denying entry to foreign reporters in the South Caucasus disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, and is urging the United Nations and Council of Europe to ensure respect for the right to the freedom to inform.
Russian peacekeepers controlling access to Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia via the Lachin Corridor have denied entry to at least 10 foreign journalists since February, the Paris-based media freedom watchdog said in a statement on April 9.
“A growing number of foreign journalists are being systematically refused entry by Russian soldiers,” said Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk.
Cavelier warned that without international media, Nagorno-Karabakh “is liable to become a news and information ‘black hole.’”
Last fall, Azerbaijani and Armenian forces fought a brief war over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave that is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but has been controlled by ethnic Armenians since the early 1990s.
The six-week fighting concluded in November 2020 with a Russian-brokered cease-fire, under which a chunk of the region and all seven districts around it were placed under Azerbaijani administration after almost 30 years of control by ethnic Armenian forces.
It also resulted in the deployment of around 2,000 Russian peacekeepers along frontline areas and the Lachin Corridor connecting the disputed territory with Armenia.
More than 6,000 people died in the fighting.
According to RSF, a French photographer, a reporter for the French TV channel M6, and a Canadian freelancer for The Guardian and CNN, were among the journalists who were denied entry in Nagorno-Karabakh since February.
The group said access to the region is also “restricted” via Azerbaijan. It cited the case of TV crews from France 24 and the European channel Arte which “made highly controlled visits from Azerbaijan and were not able to report freely.”
The Russian-brokered cease-fire agreement has no specific provision for the entry of journalists, RSF pointed out.
It said press accreditation is issued by the consulate of Nagorno-Karabakh’s separatist authorities or by the Armenian Foreign Ministry.
However, the Russia peacekeepers “grant or refuse entry to foreign citizens, who are notified of the decision on the eve of their planned visit,” while Armenians and Russians “just need to show their passports in order to enter” the region.
Sergei Sazanakov was hunting in Russia’s Khakassia region when an accident left him trapped in the snow overnight. He lost his lower legs to frostbite, and later had to fight for his children in court after his wife left him. But Sazanakov has learned how to run his farm and care for his family with minimal assistance and has only modest wishes for a better life: comfortable prosthetics and perhaps a horse.
The singer’s fight against domestic violence and homophobia and her body-positive posts on Instagram have led to a torrent of abuse – some from very powerful people
Russia’s 2021 Eurovision candidate breezes into a conference room, Channel One documentary film crew in tow, offering a simple tea of mint leaves brewed in hot water. “On days like today, I want something calming,” Manizha says, pouring two cups, as a boom mic hovers over us. No pressure.
The Tajikistan-born singer, who will perform her feminist ballad Russian Woman next month at the much-loved, much-mocked song contest in Rotterdam, is the target of a fiery conservative backlash for her foreign roots and her lyrics attacking female stereotypes.
Two Russians and an American are scheduled to take off for the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Soyuz rocket on April 9.
The Russian space agency Roskosmos expects to get cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov and NASA astronaut Mark T Vande Hei aloft from the Russian launch facility at Baikonur in Kazakhstan.
The trip to the ISS should take around three hours.
The Russian launch is the last before a rocket owned by the private U.S. company SpaceX is scheduled to set out late this month for the ISS from Florida.
Quiz: How Much Do You Know About The First Man In Space?
Test your knowledge!
Four Americans, two Russians, and a Japanese national are currently manning the ISS.
Three of them being relieved by the incoming trio will return to Earth in about a week.
The Soyuz 2.1a rocket set to carry the three men into space on April 9 has been named the Yuri Gagarin in honor of the Soviet cosmonaut who became the first human to reach space 60 years ago next week.
Gagarin orbited the Earth once on April 12, 1961, after taking off from the same Kazakh facility at the height of the U.S.-Soviet space race.
Russia’s government this month extended a space cooperation agreement with the United States until 2030, one of the few remaining partnerships between Moscow and Washington amid frosty relations.
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin approved and signed the extension on April 3.
The original cooperation agreement, signed in 1992 and extended four times previously, laid the groundwork for wide-ranging, space-related projects and research between NASA and Roskosmos.
You would think riling up one nuclear power is bad enough, but the United States seems intent on doubling the risk of starting a world war by gratuitously aggressing Russia and China simultaneously.
Throwing around personal insults against the leaders of those two countries is one thing. But actually winding up military tensions is quite another which shows how reckless the Biden administration is.
Since Joe Biden became the 46th president, there has been an alarming increase in hostile rhetoric and conduct by the US toward Russia and China.
Ludicrously, the Biden administration is accusing Moscow and Beijing of aggression towards European and Asian allies when it is the United States that is building up warships, warplanes, missiles and troops in sensitive regions that threaten Russia and China.
Under this Democrat president, the US is increasing lethal military supplies to the Ukraine where an anti-Russia regime in Kiev has been waging a seven-year war against ethnic Russian people in the east of that country on Russia’s border. It is no coincidence that the US-backed regime in Kiev is emboldened to step up offensive military attacks on civilian centers in east Ukraine. The city of Donetsk is this week reportedly coming under intensified shelling.
Likewise, the Biden White House has become more vocal in support of Taiwan, the breakaway island territory off China’s southern coast. US military leaders are warning that China might invade the island, which most nations view to be a sovereign part of Chinese territory. Since 1979, even the US recognized this under its One China policy.
Washington is, however, conducting a record number of military maneuvers in the South China Sea and through the Strait of Taiwan, only about 100 kilometers from mainland China. This week – for the fourth time since Biden took office, the US dispatched a guided-missile destroyer through the Strait.
China’s territorial claims in the region have a lot more credibility than America’s posturing about “defending allies” and so-called “freedom of navigation” exercises.
But the reckless rhetoric from the Biden administration – labelling Russia and China as “aggressors” – is serving to embolden regimes in Ukraine and Taiwan to engage in dangerous provocations.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this week called on the US-led NATO alliance to fast-track membership for his country. Such a move would be incendiary for Russia’s national security. The Kiev regime is also intensifying offensive operations in east Ukraine which is another form of provocation toward Russia due to Washington’s indulgence.
Similarly, the anti-China separatists in Taiwan are feeling ever-more confident in taking a militarist posture. With American warships sailing nearby, the Taiwanese authorities this week warned they would not hesitate to shoot down Chinese aircraft that approach the island. This is a flagrant provocation to Beijing’s authority.
The United States has indicated it will support Ukraine or Taiwan if a war with Russia or China were to erupt. Such a policy is an incentive for rogue conduct leading to war.
It is perplexing to see just how far the Biden administration is willing to go in risking a war with either Russia or China, or both at the same time. Any such war would inevitably result in a nuclear conflagration in which tens of millions of people would die, if not bring about the end of the world as we know it.
This is a measure of how desperate the American imperial state is in trying to maintain its ambitions of global hegemony and domination. US global power is waning – in line with the historic failing of its capitalist system – and in order to offset that loss of power, its ruling class are resorting to maniacal militarism against perceived geopolitical rivals. The objective is to intimidate and terrorize the world into accepting its “rules-based order”. That is rules ordered by the US for its advantage and privileges over others.
Russia and China, and many other nations, are refusing to capitulate to America’s diktat. There was a time when such bullying may have worked. Not any more.
American rulers – the deep state – and their puppet president are behaving like arsonists. They’re playing with fire in provoking Russia and China. It is criminal and it’s psychopathic recklessness. It’s also abominable that the planet is being held hostage by such a crazy American regime.
You would think riling up one nuclear power is bad enough, but the United States seems intent on doubling the risk of starting a world war by gratuitously aggressing Russia and China simultaneously.
Throwing around personal insults against the leaders of those two countries is one thing. But actually winding up military tensions is quite another which shows how reckless the Biden administration is.
Since Joe Biden became the 46th president, there has been an alarming increase in hostile rhetoric and conduct by the US toward Russia and China.
Ludicrously, the Biden administration is accusing Moscow and Beijing of aggression towards European and Asian allies when it is the United States that is building up warships, warplanes, missiles and troops in sensitive regions that threaten Russia and China.
Under this Democrat president, the US is increasing lethal military supplies to the Ukraine where an anti-Russia regime in Kiev has been waging a seven-year war against ethnic Russian people in the east of that country on Russia’s border. It is no coincidence that the US-backed regime in Kiev is emboldened to step up offensive military attacks on civilian centers in east Ukraine. The city of Donetsk is this week reportedly coming under intensified shelling.
Likewise, the Biden White House has become more vocal in support of Taiwan, the breakaway island territory off China’s southern coast. US military leaders are warning that China might invade the island, which most nations view to be a sovereign part of Chinese territory. Since 1979, even the US recognized this under its One China policy.
Washington is, however, conducting a record number of military maneuvers in the South China Sea and through the Strait of Taiwan, only about 100 kilometers from mainland China. This week – for the fourth time since Biden took office, the US dispatched a guided-missile destroyer through the Strait.
China’s territorial claims in the region have a lot more credibility than America’s posturing about “defending allies” and so-called “freedom of navigation” exercises.
But the reckless rhetoric from the Biden administration – labelling Russia and China as “aggressors” – is serving to embolden regimes in Ukraine and Taiwan to engage in dangerous provocations.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this week called on the US-led NATO alliance to fast-track membership for his country. Such a move would be incendiary for Russia’s national security. The Kiev regime is also intensifying offensive operations in east Ukraine which is another form of provocation toward Russia due to Washington’s indulgence.
Similarly, the anti-China separatists in Taiwan are feeling ever-more confident in taking a militarist posture. With American warships sailing nearby, the Taiwanese authorities this week warned they would not hesitate to shoot down Chinese aircraft that approach the island. This is a flagrant provocation to Beijing’s authority.
The United States has indicated it will support Ukraine or Taiwan if a war with Russia or China were to erupt. Such a policy is an incentive for rogue conduct leading to war.
It is perplexing to see just how far the Biden administration is willing to go in risking a war with either Russia or China, or both at the same time. Any such war would inevitably result in a nuclear conflagration in which tens of millions of people would die, if not bring about the end of the world as we know it.
This is a measure of how desperate the American imperial state is in trying to maintain its ambitions of global hegemony and domination. US global power is waning – in line with the historic failing of its capitalist system – and in order to offset that loss of power, its ruling class are resorting to maniacal militarism against perceived geopolitical rivals. The objective is to intimidate and terrorize the world into accepting its “rules-based order”. That is rules ordered by the US for its advantage and privileges over others.
Russia and China, and many other nations, are refusing to capitulate to America’s diktat. There was a time when such bullying may have worked. Not any more.
American rulers – the deep state – and their puppet president are behaving like arsonists. They’re playing with fire in provoking Russia and China. It is criminal and it’s psychopathic recklessness. It’s also abominable that the planet is being held hostage by such a crazy American regime.
Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Read other articles by Finian.
On April 1 — appropriate date, perhaps, for a saga of unending western foolishness and villainy — the EU announced that officials from Iran, Russia, China, the UK, France, and Germany would be meeting virtually to discuss a possible return of the USA to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Later announcements indicated that representatives of both the USA and Iran would meet with European partners in Vienna in the first week of April, although possibly from different rooms to separate US and Iranian representatives. Talks began on August 6.
A State Department spokesman welcomed the move, indicating the Biden administration’s preparedness to return to the 2015 deal tortuously negotiated over several years between Iran, the US Obama administration and European powers, and that former President Donald Trump later unilaterally abrogated in May 2018. A pretense by the USA and Europe that resumption of JCPOA requires arduous negotiation camouflages the reality that it has always been obvious that removal of US sanctions on Iran would automatically prompt its immediate return to the JCPOA framework.
The use of the potential (but not the actuality) of nuclear weapons in the form of weapons development capability has arguably been an instrument of Iranian foreign diplomacy from the days of the Shah, first as a defense against nuclearization of regional neighbors and, since the Islamic revolution in 1979 — and in the guise of varying percentages of uranium enrichment and the construction of centrifuges (many unused) — against US and European opposition to Iranian independence from Washington.
The 2015 deal itself was the outcome of a long-standing, bullying, propaganda campaign by the USA, Israel, and Europe (UK, France, and Germany) to smear Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy program (including the slight enrichment of uranium for scientific and medical purposes, far below the 90%+ required for nuclear weaponry) as a meaningful threat of nuclear war. Yet Iran, a signatory in 1968 of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), had over several decades conceded detailed scrutiny of its energy program (perfectly legitimate, under the NPT) to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Israel, on the other hand, in possession of one hundred or more nuclear warheads, never signed the NPT.
Israel, with a far smaller population (9 million) than Iran (82 million) and a far smaller territory (22,145 sq.km to Iran’s 1,648,195 sq km), is and has consistently shown evidence of being by far the more likely nuclear aggressor in the Middle East. In June 1981, an Israeli airstrike destroyed an unfinished suspected Iraqi nuclear reactor located 17 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, Iraq. In 2007, Israel struck a suspected nuclear reactor in the Deir ez-Zor region of Syria. In the period 2009 to 2012 the Israeli administration of Benjamin Netanyahu several times threatened to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. In addition, the US and Israeli administrations collaborated in a cyberattack on Iranian facilities (“Stuxnet”) in 2009. There have been several assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists – the latest reported in November 2020 – mostly attributed to Israel’s Mossad.
Through JCPOA, Iran — which has never possessed nuclear weapons and which has never formally revealed evidence of wanting or planning them — was cowered into conceding an implicit but false admission to being at fault in some way. Iran’s Supreme Leaders have consistently stated their belief that such weapons are immoral. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, confirmed a fatwa against the acquisition, development and use of nuclear weapons in October 2003. “Evidence” of Iranian scientists’ planning for nuclear weaponry is based on forgeries. The bullying gang was a cabal of more prosperous nations that unlike Iran, did possess nuclear weapons and, in the case of the USA, had actually used them and, from time to time, demonstrated continuing willingness to consider their use.
Furthermore, Washington has never shown a fraction of the hysteria it regularly performs on account of Iran’s (non-existent) nuclear “threat” as it did with the actual nuclear weaponization of India from 1998 (with possibly 150 nuclear warheads today) and Pakistan in 1972.
Iran’s misleading concession to the West’s false narrative was the product of Western coercion through sanctions’ regimes. US-driven sanctions’ terror over Iran, both primary (involving relations between Iran and U.S. actors) and secondary (involving relations between Iran and non-U.S. actors), started from the early 1980s and extended in 1995 to cover bilateral trade and foreign investment in Iranian oil and gas development. Sanctions were further extended in 2002 to include nuclear and missile technology, financial services, transportation, foreign banks operating in Iran, and purchase of Iranian oil. Although many sanctions were lifted by JCPOA, others were retained, including Iranian support for terrorism, development of ballistic missiles, arms-related transactions, violations of human rights and corruption. The slipperiness of concepts such as “terrorism,” “human rights,” and “corruption” in the hands of U.S. and allied states and state-compliant “NGO” agencies provides ample room for continuing sanctions aggression on false or misleading pretext. This is particularly worrisome in the contexts of covert and proxy wars between the US, European powers, Gulf States, Israel, and Salafist rebels in Syria, on the one hand and, on the other, the Syrian government, Russia, and Iranian-backed Hezbollah, as also in the case of Iranian support for the Houthis in Yemen. Even a return to JCPOA, therefore, would exercise considerable restraint on Iranian exercise of its legitimate, sovereign power.
Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy program originated from imperial machinations in Iran. It was launched in 1957 with US and European assistance in the administration of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, in the wake of the US-UK orchestrated coup d’etat of 1953 that toppled democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The program continued until the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The Shah approved plans to construct up to 23 nuclear power stations by 2000. It is possible that the Shah always entertained the possibility of transitioning from a nuclear energy to a nuclear weapons program should neighboring states do the same. The USA supplied the country with a reactor fueled by highly enriched uranium in 1967. After a two-year hiatus, the Shah’s program was resumed by the revolutionary administration in 1981. The regime intended to continue collaborating with a French-owned consortium, but France succumbed to pressure from the Reagan administration in 1984 to end all nuclear cooperation with Iran, despite the absence of any evidence for US claims that Iran’s then only reactor presented a risk of proliferation. In the 1990s, Russia formed a joint research organization with Iran, providing Iran with Russian nuclear experts and technical information.
Sanctions have a negative impact on the Iranian economy and the welfare of its people. The value of Iranian petroleum exports fell from $53 billion in 2016-2017 to $9 billion in 2019-2020. Iranian GDP shrank by between 5% and 6.5% each year in the period 2018-2020, and inflation rose each year between 30% and 41%. The value of the Iranian currency, the rial, fell from 64,500 rials to the dollar in May 2018 to 315,000 to the dollar in October 2020.
As strategies of control, sanctions have significant other weaknesses, even from the western point of view. Since the revolution of 1979, first, there is a clear correlation between western aggression towards Iran and the influence on the Iranian polity of anti-western Iranian conservatives and their control over Iranian society through the clerical hierarchy and its exercise of superordinate power over Iran’s parliamentary democracy by the Office of the (non-elected) Supreme Leader, the Council of Guardians, the religious foundations (or bonyads) and Revolutionary Guards. Second, sanctions encourage Iranian strategies of import substitution and technological independence. Third, they help consolidate Iran’s relations with global powers that rival Washington, including Russia and China, and its relations with sympathetic powers in the region, including Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. In March 2021 Iran and China agreed a deal whereby China would invest $400 billion in Iran over 25 years in exchange for a steady supply of oil to fuel. The deal represented a further incursion of Chinese influence in the Middle East (extending to an offer by China to broker peace between Israel and Palestine) at the likely expense of the USA, promising further escalation of tensions between China and the USA and the ultimate threat of nuclear war.
Oliver Boyd-Barrett is Professor Emeritus of Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He is a scholar of international media, news, and war propaganda. Read other articles by Oliver.
On April 1 — appropriate date, perhaps, for a saga of unending western foolishness and villainy — the EU announced that officials from Iran, Russia, China, the UK, France, and Germany would be meeting virtually to discuss a possible return of the USA to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Later announcements indicated that representatives of both the USA and Iran would meet with European partners in Vienna in the first week of April, although possibly from different rooms to separate US and Iranian representatives. Talks began on August 6.
A State Department spokesman welcomed the move, indicating the Biden administration’s preparedness to return to the 2015 deal tortuously negotiated over several years between Iran, the US Obama administration and European powers, and that former President Donald Trump later unilaterally abrogated in May 2018. A pretense by the USA and Europe that resumption of JCPOA requires arduous negotiation camouflages the reality that it has always been obvious that removal of US sanctions on Iran would automatically prompt its immediate return to the JCPOA framework.
The use of the potential (but not the actuality) of nuclear weapons in the form of weapons development capability has arguably been an instrument of Iranian foreign diplomacy from the days of the Shah, first as a defense against nuclearization of regional neighbors and, since the Islamic revolution in 1979 — and in the guise of varying percentages of uranium enrichment and the construction of centrifuges (many unused) — against US and European opposition to Iranian independence from Washington.
The 2015 deal itself was the outcome of a long-standing, bullying, propaganda campaign by the USA, Israel, and Europe (UK, France, and Germany) to smear Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy program (including the slight enrichment of uranium for scientific and medical purposes, far below the 90%+ required for nuclear weaponry) as a meaningful threat of nuclear war. Yet Iran, a signatory in 1968 of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), had over several decades conceded detailed scrutiny of its energy program (perfectly legitimate, under the NPT) to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Israel, on the other hand, in possession of one hundred or more nuclear warheads, never signed the NPT.
Israel, with a far smaller population (9 million) than Iran (82 million) and a far smaller territory (22,145 sq.km to Iran’s 1,648,195 sq km), is and has consistently shown evidence of being by far the more likely nuclear aggressor in the Middle East. In June 1981, an Israeli airstrike destroyed an unfinished suspected Iraqi nuclear reactor located 17 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, Iraq. In 2007, Israel struck a suspected nuclear reactor in the Deir ez-Zor region of Syria. In the period 2009 to 2012 the Israeli administration of Benjamin Netanyahu several times threatened to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. In addition, the US and Israeli administrations collaborated in a cyberattack on Iranian facilities (“Stuxnet”) in 2009. There have been several assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists – the latest reported in November 2020 – mostly attributed to Israel’s Mossad.
Through JCPOA, Iran — which has never possessed nuclear weapons and which has never formally revealed evidence of wanting or planning them — was cowered into conceding an implicit but false admission to being at fault in some way. Iran’s Supreme Leaders have consistently stated their belief that such weapons are immoral. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, confirmed a fatwa against the acquisition, development and use of nuclear weapons in October 2003. “Evidence” of Iranian scientists’ planning for nuclear weaponry is based on forgeries. 1 The bullying gang was a cabal of more prosperous nations that unlike Iran, did possess nuclear weapons and, in the case of the USA, had actually used them and, from time to time, demonstrated continuing willingness to consider their use.
Furthermore, Washington has never shown a fraction of the hysteria it regularly performs on account of Iran’s (non-existent) nuclear “threat” as it did with the actual nuclear weaponization of India from 1998 (with possibly 150 nuclear warheads today) and Pakistan in 1972.
Iran’s misleading concession to the West’s false narrative was the product of Western coercion through sanctions’ regimes. US-driven sanctions’ terror over Iran, both primary (involving relations between Iran and U.S. actors) and secondary (involving relations between Iran and non-U.S. actors), started from the early 1980s and extended in 1995 to cover bilateral trade and foreign investment in Iranian oil and gas development. Sanctions were further extended in 2002 to include nuclear and missile technology, financial services, transportation, foreign banks operating in Iran, and purchase of Iranian oil. Although many sanctions were lifted by JCPOA, others were retained, including Iranian support for terrorism, development of ballistic missiles, arms-related transactions, violations of human rights and corruption. The slipperiness of concepts such as “terrorism,” “human rights,” and “corruption” in the hands of U.S. and allied states and state-compliant “NGO” agencies provides ample room for continuing sanctions aggression on false or misleading pretext. This is particularly worrisome in the contexts of covert and proxy wars between the US, European powers, Gulf States, Israel, and Salafist rebels in Syria, on the one hand and, on the other, the Syrian government, Russia, and Iranian-backed Hezbollah, as also in the case of Iranian support for the Houthis in Yemen. Even a return to JCPOA, therefore, would exercise considerable restraint on Iranian exercise of its legitimate, sovereign power.
Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy program originated from imperial machinations in Iran. It was launched in 1957 with US and European assistance in the administration of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, in the wake of the US-UK orchestrated coup d’etat of 1953 that toppled democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The program continued until the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The Shah approved plans to construct up to 23 nuclear power stations by 2000. It is possible that the Shah always entertained the possibility of transitioning from a nuclear energy to a nuclear weapons program should neighboring states do the same. The USA supplied the country with a reactor fueled by highly enriched uranium in 1967. After a two-year hiatus, the Shah’s program was resumed by the revolutionary administration in 1981. The regime intended to continue collaborating with a French-owned consortium, but France succumbed to pressure from the Reagan administration in 1984 to end all nuclear cooperation with Iran, despite the absence of any evidence for US claims that Iran’s then only reactor presented a risk of proliferation. In the 1990s, Russia formed a joint research organization with Iran, providing Iran with Russian nuclear experts and technical information.
Sanctions have a negative impact on the Iranian economy and the welfare of its people. The value of Iranian petroleum exports fell from $53 billion in 2016-2017 to $9 billion in 2019-2020. Iranian GDP shrank by between 5% and 6.5% each year in the period 2018-2020, and inflation rose each year between 30% and 41%. The value of the Iranian currency, the rial, fell from 64,500 rials to the dollar in May 2018 to 315,000 to the dollar in October 2020.
As strategies of control, sanctions have significant other weaknesses, even from the western point of view. Since the revolution of 1979, first, there is a clear correlation between western aggression towards Iran and the influence on the Iranian polity of anti-western Iranian conservatives and their control over Iranian society through the clerical hierarchy and its exercise of superordinate power over Iran’s parliamentary democracy by the Office of the (non-elected) Supreme Leader, the Council of Guardians, the religious foundations (or bonyads) and Revolutionary Guards. Second, sanctions encourage Iranian strategies of import substitution and technological independence. Third, they help consolidate Iran’s relations with global powers that rival Washington, including Russia and China, and its relations with sympathetic powers in the region, including Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. In March 2021 Iran and China agreed a deal whereby China would invest $400 billion in Iran over 25 years in exchange for a steady supply of oil to fuel. The deal represented a further incursion of Chinese influence in the Middle East (extending to an offer by China to broker peace between Israel and Palestine) at the likely expense of the USA, promising further escalation of tensions between China and the USA and the ultimate threat of nuclear war.
Kiriakou, J. and Porter, G. (2020) The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis: From CIA Coup to the Brink of War. New York: Skyhorse Publishing.
Lawyers based in Russia and in parts of eastern Ukraine held by Moscow-backed separatists have flooded the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) with thousands of complaints against Kyiv for alleged rights violations in conflict-ridden Donbas, in what appears to be a coordinated campaign to tar Ukraine, an investigation by RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service has found.
The investigative TV program Skhemy (Schemes) found that around 6,000 claims related to the conflict in the Donbas, out of a total of 10,000 claims Ukraine faces at the ECHR, were filed by several groups of lawyers from Russia and areas of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of eastern Ukraine that are under the control of Russia-backed separatists.
A Moscow law firm that has filed thousands of complaints has substantial experience “defending the interests” of the Russian government, and a lawyer in the Donbas who has also filed claims is under investigation on suspicion of falsifying application forms to international courts.
The number of cases that will ultimately be considered by the Strasbourg-based court, let alone brought to trial, is unclear. Still, the sheer number of filings has bumped Ukraine up to third among nations facing rights-violations allegations at the ECHR.
Moscow has long asserted that Ukraine violates the rights of Russian speakers in the Donbas. It has used those claims to justify interference in the region, including its backing of the separatists’ seizure of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in 2014, and as a potential catalyst for stepped-up military action in the future.
More than 13,000 people have been killed and thousands more wounded in the war that erupted in the Donbas in April 2014, a month after Russia’s armed takeover of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Russia denies involvement despite ample evidence showing it has provided arms, fighters, financing, and other aid to the separatists.
Until 2014, no claims of rights violations had been filed over Kyiv’s policies or actions in the Donbas at the ECHR, Ukrainian human rights lawyer Serhiy Zayets told Schemes, a joint investigative project of RFE/RL and Ukrainian public broadcaster UA:First.
Serhiy Zayets
“There are several Russian lawyers who started filing complaints only after 2014. They have no complaints against Russia, and only against Ukraine,” Zayets said, adding that it is “an extremely large number of cases.”
Troop Buildup
The report by Schemes comes amid evidence of a Russian troop buildup — including heavy armor such as tanks — in and around Ukraine, primarily in Crimea and in areas abutting the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, in what some analysts have argued could portend a major Russian offensive. Others say it’s more likely to be a show of force aimed to frighten Kyiv, the European Union, and the United States.
The Schemes report also comes less than two months after Ukraine accused Russia of the “targeted assassinations” of “perceived opponents” in a case filed at the ECHR, the latest in a series of legal complaints against Moscow.
It was the ninth case filed by Ukraine against Russia at the ECHR, four of which are still pending and refer to the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, human rights violations in Crimea, and Russia’s seizure of three Ukrainian Navy vessels in the Kerch Strait in 2018.
The Schemes investigation found that lawyers linked to Klishin and Partners, a Moscow-based law firm, had filed more than 5,000 complaints at the ECHR against Ukraine for rights violations.
Asked about the complaints, Klishin and Partners declined to provide a substantive comment, sending a statement to Schemes saying that it had “not registered any public interest in Russia” in the topic.
It also said it was not obliged to reply to an organization deemed “foreign agents,” a reference to controversial Russian legislation under which several Russian-language services of RFE/RL have been designated as “foreign agents” by the Russian authorities.
Coordinated Effort?
Whether Klishin and Partners were acting in coordination with the Kremlin is unclear. On its website, the firm states it has “sufficient experience defending the interests of the government.”
Also active in filing complaints at the ECHR has been Vladimir Fyodorov, a Russian lawyer who bragged to separatist-run TV in the Donetsk region in 2016 that, thanks in part to his efforts, Ukraine was among the nations facing the largest number of claims at the court.
Without providing specific evidence, Fyodorov asserted that, early in the conflict, the court “did everything possible not to accept these lawsuits from us…but they were forced to…in part due to our work, thanks to which, Ukraine is now on top in [terms of] the number of lawsuits at the European Court of Human Rights.”
Fyodorov’s brother, Grigoriy, is a former member of the Russian Civic Chamber, and has also been active in such efforts.
Schemes also found that a significant number of complaints have emerged from lawyers working within areas of the Donbas under Russia-backed separatist control. Vitaliy Galakhov, head of an organization called Fair Protection claimed to have sent some 2,000 claims to the ECHR in 2018. Schemes was able to confirm that only four claims filed by Galakhov are actually pending at the court now.
Galakhov is wanted by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) on suspicion of falsifying application forms to international courts from residents of areas of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions under the control of the Russian-backed separatists. Law enforcement officers have found about 100 people who contend that they did not actually apply, according to the Schemes investigation.
Oleh Tsarev (left) is seen with separatist leader Aleksandr Borodai in Donetsk in June 2014.
Also active in filing Donbas-related complaints against Kyiv at the court, Schemes found, has been the Union of Refugees of Ukraine, established by Oleh Tsarev, a former Ukrainian lawmaker from the Moscow-friendly Party of Regions and a leading separatist figure in eastern Ukraine for a time.
Although no direct link to the Kremlin was discovered in the investigation, Moscow can only gain from such a campaign, opined Aleksandr Cherkasov, director of the Russian human rights group Memorial.
Aleksandr Cherkasov (file photo)
“Any decision by an international body that is beneficial to Russia will then be used [by Moscow] either as propaganda or a trump card to be used during negotiations,” Cherkasov told Schemes, referring to efforts to resolve the conflict in the Donbas.
“If a decision is made in favor of [Russia], then it was made by wise Western lawyers and politicians,” he said, describing how he believes the Kremlin would seek to take advantage of such cases. “And if not in [Russia’s] favor, then it’s the result of a sellout to the plutocrats who are opposed to [Russia] politically.”
Written by Tony Wesolowsky based on reporting by Valeria Yehoshyna of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service
TOMSK, Russia — The former mayor of the Siberian city of Tomsk, Ivan Klyain, has rejected charges of abuse of office and illegal business activities at the start of his trial.
Klyain stated in the courtroom on April 8 that he’s not guilty of any of the charges and described allegations by investigators and prosecutors as attempts to put “pressure” on him.
Klyain was arrested in November 2020 with investigators saying at the time that he was suspected of using his post to illegally prevent the construction of a building in 2016-17 on land close to the Tomsk Beer company, which he controls.
The 61-year-old Klyain has served as the mayor of Tomsk since 2013. Before being appointed to the post, he had been the general director of the Tomsk Beer company — one of the largest breweries in the region — since 1994.
After becoming mayor, his wife was elected by Tomsk Beer’s board of directors as the facility’s general director.
In 2013, the Kommersant newspaper wrote that Klyain owned 51 percent of Tomsk Beer, while his spouse and daughters owned 20 percent of the company’s shares.
For several years, Klyain declared one of the highest incomes among Russian mayors, according to Moskovsky Komsomolets.
Slovakia’s drug regulator has said that the Russian Sputnik V doses it received differ from the same vaccine reviewed by the EU’s drug overseer and the U.K.-based medical journal The Lancet.
The State Institute for Drug Control (SUKL) did not explain how the mix-up might have occurred.
“Batches of [Sputnik V] vaccine used in preclinical tests and clinical studies published in The Lancet journal do not have the same characteristics and properties as batches of vaccine imported to Slovakia,” the SUKL said a statement.
The SUKL had already said the day before that lingering questions about the efficacy and risks of the Russian vaccine due to inadequate data from the producer were preventing use of the doses.
EU member Slovakia received 200,000 batches of Sputnik V, which has still not been cleared by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), last month.
The Russian Health Ministry, which supervises the Gamaleya Institute where Sputnik V was developed, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
“On March 30, 2021, the agency officially sent an evaluation report to the Health Ministry, in which it stated that it was not possible to make a conclusion on the balance of benefits and risks of the Sputnik V vaccine,” Reuters quoted SUKL as saying on April 7.
The regulator cited “an amount of missing data from the producer, inconsistency of dosage forms, and [the] impossibility of mutually comparing batches used in various studies and countries.”
As its inspection continues, reports say the EMA’s approval will also be contingent on “good clinical practice” (GCP) standards.
Russian backers of the vaccine, which was registered to great Kremlin fanfare last year despite concerns about underlying data and unfinished clinical trials, have denied the problems should stand in the way of safe rollout.
Slovakia’s prime minister, Igor Matovic, was forced to resign last week under a cloud of questions about his administration’s order for 2 million doses of Sputnik V.
In the neighboring Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis on April 7 announced the dismissal of a health minister who was reportedly resisting pressure — including public complaints by President Milos Zeman — to order Sputnik V.
Sputnik V is already being used in EU member Hungary and other countries around the world.
The German state of Bavaria recently announced an agreement to buy 2.5 million doses of Sputnik V pending approval by European regulators.
The Embassy of the Russian Federation in Thailand announced on its website that three more Mil Mi-17V-5 Hip-H’ medium transport helicopters have been delivered to the Royal Thai Army (RTA). The helicopters were officially handed over to RTA official during a ceremony at U-Tapao airbase on 26 March. The latest addition brings the total number […]
The closely linked Russian and Belarusian currencies have weakened sharply amid an ongoing slew of seemingly unrelated political and diplomatic challenges for the two post-Soviet neighbors.
Russia’s ruble hit a five-month low against the U.S. dollar on April 7 despite hints at a possible monetary tightening by the Russian central bank that could have propped up the currency.
The Belarusian ruble weakened to a record of 2.66 to the dollar the same day, breaking a previous low from February and nearing levels from the weeks just after a disputed election in August 2020.
Both economies have been stymied by Western sanctions, blacklisting, and other punitive measures over their authoritarian leaders’ increasingly repressive tactics to quell dissent.
Russian President Vladimir Putin faces increasing international pressure over the poisoning and jailing of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, while Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who had ruled Belarus since 1994, has been condemned in the West for his brutal crackdown on peaceful protests since a dubious reelection claim in August.
Experts also cite fears of escalating conflict near Ukraine’s border with Russia, where Moscow has acknowledged a troop buildup as skirmishes intensify in Ukraine six years into a conflict between Russian-backed separatists and forces loyal to Kyiv.
NATO and Western leaders have stepped up contacts with Ukraine’s leadership and warned Russia against “provocations.”
Currency traders think a Russian interest rate hike is coming but the Russian ruble remains stubbornly low “due to fears over military escalations in Donbas,” Credit Suisse analysts wrote in a note this week, referring to the eastern region of the former Soviet republic.
Pandemic Problems
In addition to international sanctions over Moscow’s actions in Ukraine, Russia’s economy has also been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and low oil prices.
Analysts have suggested Russia’s recovery after the pandemic will lag behind those of many other emerging markets amid what they called lingering signs of “fundamental weakness.”
In Belarus, tens of thousands of people have been detained in the protests since a presidential election that the opposition and the West say was rigged.
Most of the opposition leadership has been arrested or forced into exile, including opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who has been rallying international support for the pro-democracy movement since fleeing to Lithuania.
The West has responded with sanctions on top officials and rejects Lukashenka as Belarus’s legitimate leader.
The Belarusian economy was already in a weak position before the political crisis, while the coronavirus pandemic has created additional problems.
Andrei Karpunin, chairman of Belarus’s Club of Financial Directors, cited a decrease in remittances from Belarusians working abroad as a major factor in that currency’s fall.
But he also predicted that if sanctions continue to dog the economy, Belarusians will have little choice but to withdraw ruble deposits to convert them into hard currency, further hurting the exchange rate.
With reporting by RFE/RL’s Belarus Service, AFP, Reuters, and AP
MOSCOW — The house arrest of the brother of jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, a close associate, and two Moscow municipal lawmakers who are charged with breaking coronavirus restrictions by publicly calling on Moscow residents to take part in unsanctioned rallies in January, has been cancelled.
Vladimir Voronin, the lawyer for Lyubov Sobol, who is a lawyer with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), said late on April 7 that the Moscow City Court had ruled to replace the house arrest of his client, as well as Navalny’s brother, Oleg Navalny, and Moscow city lawmakers, Lyusya Shtein and Konstantin Yankauskas, with other restrictions.
According to the court decision, the new restrictions include being barred from leaving their homes between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., a ban on communicating with other individuals in the case, a ban on the use of all methods of communication to discuss issues related to the case, and a ban on the use of regular mail or telegraphic communication.
The four, along with six other supporters and associates of Navalny, were detained in January on the eve of unsanctioned mass rallies against the Kremlin critic’s arrest.
The others include Anastasia Vasilyeva, the chief of the Alliance of Doctors NGO; Maria Alyokhina, a leading member of the Pussy Riot protest group; Oleg Stepanov, a coordinator of Navalny’s team in Moscow; Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh; activist Nikolai Lyaskin; and a municipal lawmaker Dmitry Baranovsky.
The majority of them remain under house arrest and all have been charged with violating sanitary and epidemiological safety precautions during a pandemic. If found guilty of the charges, each faces up to two years in prison.
The Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow has recognized the group as political prisoners.
The German state of Bavaria has signed an agreement to buy 2.5 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine once it is approved by European regulators.
Markus Soeder, the premier of the southeastern German state, said on April 7 that Bavaria signed a memorandum of understanding for the supply of Sputnik V.
If the Sputnik V vaccine is approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), Bavaria is set to receive around 2.5 million doses through a company that would produce the vaccine in the Bavarian town of Illertissen, Soeder said.
Production in Illertissen could start this year, Bavaria’s Health Minister Klaus Holetschek said.
The memorandum includes the possibility of importing the drug as well, Holetschek said, adding, “It is a highly effective vaccine.”
The EMA is currently reviewing Sputnik V for authorization. EMA experts are expected to travel to Russia later this month to survey production and storage of the vaccine.
Russia approved Sputnik V for use in August, making it the first vaccine against COVID-19 to be authorized although medical trials had not been completed at that time.
The EMA will investigate those trials and whether they followed “good clinical practices,” the Financial Times reported on April 7 citing anonymous sources familiar with the EMA approval process. The sources said there were ethical concerns over how Sputnik V was tested before it was released for general use.
The German government, which has faced criticism for a slow vaccine rollout as it struggles with deliveries and supply, said last month said that it would be open to using Sputnik V if it is approved by the EMA.
Algeria also announced news about Sputnik V on April 7, saying that it would start producing the vaccine in September in partnership with Moscow.
The production will be intended for African countries, the Algeria’s minister for the pharmaceutical industry said on April 7.
The North African country, which already has received 50,000 doses of Sputnik V, said in February it was in talks with Russia to produce the vaccine.
The vaccine will be produced in partnership with state pharmaceutical products firm Saidal, which will get help from an Indian laboratory specialized in the manufacture of vaccines, Benbahmed said.
“Three committees are working on the transfer of the technology provided by the Russian side,” Benbahmed said. “Algeria will have its share and responsibility in the vaccination of the African populations.”
Armenia’s prime minister has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin for help in releasing dozens of prisoners of war captured by Azerbaijan during last year’s brief war over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Speaking on April 7 during a trip to Moscow, Nikol Pashinian also said Armenia was interested in acquiring more Russian-made Sputnik-V vaccines.
Last fall’s war between Armenia and Azerbaijan was waged over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave that is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but has been controlled by ethnic Armenians since the early 1990s.
The six-week war concluded with a Russian-brokered cease-fire, under which a chunk of Nagorno-Karabakh and all seven districts around it were placed under Azerbaijani administration after almost 30 years of control by ethnic Armenian forces.
The agreement also led to the deployment of around 2,000 Russian peacekeepers along frontline areas and a land corridor connecting the disputed territory with Armenia.
More than 6,000 people died in the fighting.
The final status of Nagorno-Karabakh remains unresolved.
There are no official figures of how many Armenian POWs are being held by Azerbaijan, but the RBC news agency said there were about 140 Armenians still being held in Azerbaijan. It’s unclear how many Azerbaijani POWs there are.
“I would like to note that in this context there is a very important issue that has not yet been settled,” Pashinian told Putin. “This is a question of prisoners of war, hostages and other detainees.”
“As we have repeatedly discussed…all hostages, prisoners of war, and other detainees should be returned to their homeland, but, unfortunately, we still have detainees in Azerbaijan,” the Armenian prime minister added.
In his meeting with Putin, Pashinian said the first shipment of 15,000 doses of the Sputnik V vaccine was expected to arrive in Armenia on April 6, but the country needs more than 1 million doses in all.
“The first shipment was, so to speak, a symbolic shipment. We hope to acquire a large amount of the Russian vaccine, because it has proven its efficacy,” he said.
Pashinian’s trip to Moscow came as Armenia prepares for early parliamentary elections in June, triggered by opposition demands the prime minister step down over his handling of the war with Azerbaijan.
Above photo: Foreign policy. Dear President Biden, We last communicated with you on December 20, 2020, when you were President-elect. At that time, we alerted you to the dangers inherent in formulating a policy toward Russia built on a foundation of Russia-bashing. While we continue to support the analysis contained in that memorandum, this new memo serves […]
Igor Krainov was detained on drug-possession charges in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod in 2019. But CCTV footage helped him get the charges dropped and turn the tables on the police, who appeared to plant evidence in his pocket. Three officers lost their jobs and are facing a criminal investigation.
