Police clashed violently with protesters in Moscow on January 23, beating back crowds and detaining demonstrators. More than 2,100 people are reported to have been detained by police at rallies across Russia demanding the release of Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny, described as some of the biggest anti-government protests in the country in years.
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Russian police detained Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny, during a protest in Moscow on January 23. Her lawyer was not allowed to accompany her to a police van as she was taken away. Navalnaya was released after several hours in custody. Navalny called on his supporters to protest after being arrested last weekend when he returned to Moscow for the first time since being poisoned in August with a military-grade nerve agent. Navalny had been treated in Germany. Police have declared the rallies in Moscow and dozens of other cities illegal and have arrested over 1,900 people.
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Thousands rallied across Russia’s regions on January 23 to demand the release of imprisoned opposition leader and Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny. Navalny was jailed upon his return to Moscow last weekend after receiving medical treatment in Germany for Novichok poisoning. There were demonstrations in Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Bernaul, Perm, Tomsk, and Ufa, with scuffles with truncheon-wielding police recorded in some of the cities.
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Russian police detained Lyubov Sobol, a close ally of Aleksei Navalny, at a rally in central Moscow calling for the release of the opposition leader and Kremlin critic. Navalny was jailed last weekend upon returning to Moscow after medical treatment in Germany for Novichok poisoning. Sobol was speaking to reporters in a crowd of people on January 23 when riot police swooped in and surrounded her. She was herded through the crowd to a waiting police van, where she was taken away. The Kremlin has said the nationwide protests are illegal. Hundreds have been detained.
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Young and old came to demonstrate and rally in central Vladivostok on January 23, braving cold weather and police crackdowns to call for the release of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny. The Kremlin critic was jailed last weekend upon his return to Moscow after receiving medical treatment in Germany for Novichok poisoning. Many demonstrators were aware of a documentary produced by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation that exposed a billion-dollar palace allegedly built for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Protesters could be seen holding screenshots from the film. Reports suggest the protests were likely to be Russia’s largest since March 2017, when coordinated anti-government demonstrations took place in 99 cities and towns across the country.
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The OVD-Info group, which monitors Russian police activity, reported at least 237 arrests across 30 cities ahead of the planned Moscow and St. Petersburg rallies — adding that authorities in Khabarovsk reportedly were beating detainees.
Video posted on Twitter from Vladivostok showed police in riot gear charging at demonstrators and beating some with truncheons to disperse that gathering.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Russians are expected to take to the streets nationwide on January 23 in support of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny in a move to pressure the Kremlin to order his release after he was jailed upon his return to Moscow last weekend.
Ahead of the coordinated action in at least 65 cities and towns, Russian authorities have detained several Navalny allies and warned social media platforms to pull down posts calling on people to attend the “unsanctioned” rallies or face hefty fines.
The protests are a high-stakes test of Navalny’s support in the depths of a Russian winter during a pandemic, pitting outrage over the Kremlin critic’s treatment following months of recovery in Germany after being poisoned with a military grade chemical agent against how much of a threat President Vladimir Putin sees from the 44-year-old lawyer.
“We know the Kremlin fears mass demonstrations,” Leonid Volkov, coordinator of Navalny’s Anticorruption Foundation (FBK), was quoted by Reuters as saying.
“We know the Kremlin has never failed in recent years to bend one way or the other if the demonstrations were powerful and strong enough.”
Authorities so far, however, have shown few signs of bending, ramping up pressure in recent days on Navalny and his associates, detaining several and issuing stark warnings that police will be out in full force.
Universities and colleges in different Russian regions are reported to have urged students not to attend rallies, with some saying they may be subject to disciplinary action, including expulsion.
Russia’s largest social network VKontakte blocked all the pages dedicated to the rallies after Roskomnadzor, the national telecommunications watchdog, announced that it would fine social media companies for encouraging minors to participate in the protests.
That action came amid media reports of calls for demonstrations — and videos of school students replacing portraits of Putin in their classrooms with that of Navalny — going viral among teenagers on social network TikTok.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on January 22 that “it is only natural that there are warnings…about the possible consequences related to noncompliance with the law” since there are calls for “unauthorized, unlawful events.”
Navalny, Putin’s most-prominent critic, was taken into police custody shortly after his arrival in Russia on January 17 from Berlin where he was treated for a near-fatal poisoning in August with a Soviet-style chemical from the Novichok group.
At a hastily arranged hearing at a police station on January 18, a judge authorized Navalny’s detention for 30 days pending a ruling on his suspended sentence that could be revoked and replaced by prison time, allegedly for parole violations.
In a message on Instagram via his lawyer late on January 22, he said from a Moscow jail cell that he wanted people to know he was in good physical and mental health.
“Just in case, I am announcing that I don’t plan to either hang myself on a window grill or cut my veins or throat open with a sharpened spoon,” the post said.
“I use the staircase very carefully. They measure my blood pressure every day and it’s like a cosmonaut’s so a sudden heart attack is ruled out. I know for a fact that there are many good people outside my prison and that help will come,” he added.
Navalny has accused Putin of ordering his assassination and has called for Russians to “take to the streets” to protest against his detention, which has sparked widespread Western condemnation, with the United States, the European Union, France and Canada all calling for his release.
Human Rights Watch on January 22 chided Russian authorities to cease what it called “unlawful attacks on freedom of expression and instead focus on ensuring safety measures to protect those who wish to assemble peacefully.”
“In the past year Russian authorities have effectively banned all peaceful protest by the political opposition and prosecuted anyone who has refused to comply,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
Dozens of influential Russians, including actors, musicians, journalists, writers, athletes and popular bloggers, have come out with statements in support of Navalny, and some promised to attend the demonstrations.
Navalny’s team, meanwhile, has urged Russians to ignore official warnings to stay at home.
“Arrested for 9 days. Well, you know what to do. January 23 14.00, the central streets of your cities. Come!” Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh, said in a tweet on January 22 after being sentenced for organizing an unsanctioned event.
Bloomberg, citing two sources close to Russia’s leaders, reported on January 22 that the Kremlin intends to imprison Navalny for “several years, or even more” but Volkov said the demonstrations would continue until Navalny is freed.
“Should demonstrations on January 23 not bring about an immediate result, which is clear — we demand a release of Aleksei Navalny — then such actions will be repeated over and over again,” Volkov said in a January 22 interview with Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
Navalny faces a years-long prison term — authorities accused him of violating the terms of a suspended sentence in a 2014 conviction for financial misdeeds, including when he was convalescing in Germany.
He and supporters reject the charges, saying they are politically motivated to put an end to his anti-corruption work.
Navalny’s latest volley against state corruption — a two-hour video about a $1.36 billion palace on the Black Sea allegedly belonging to President Vladimir Putin — was released just two days after he was detained.
The video has since become the most-watched report ever published by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Peskov said on January 22 that the investigation into Putin and the Black Sea mansion was a “lie” and a “cut-and-paste job.”
With reporting by Current Time, RFE/RL’s Russian Service, AFP, dpa, Reuters, and AP
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President Joe Biden intends to seek a five-year extension of New START with Russia.
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Albania says it is expelling a Russian diplomat for allegedly violating lockdown rules aimed at stemming the spread of the coronavirus in the Adriatic country.
The Albanian government declared Aleksei Krivosheev “persona non grata” and required him to leave the country within 72 hours, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on January 21, citing “repeated” violations of pandemic restrictions by the diplomat since April 2020.
The ministry said senior representatives of the Foreign Ministry first addressed the matter with the Russia ambassador in Tirana, but the diplomat continued to break lockdown rules.
“Repeated challenging of the protective rules and steps on the pandemic, and disregarding the concerns of Albanian state institutions related to that, cannot be justified and tolerated anymore,” the statement said.
It did not give the diplomat’s position or provide details on the alleged violations.
There was no immediate comment from Russian officials.
Albania has imposed an overnight curfew, mandatory use of masks both indoors and outdoors, as well as social distancing.
Tirana resumed diplomatic relations with Moscow in 1991, 30 years after the country’s then-communist regime severed previously close ties with the Soviet Union.
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Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer for Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, has been detained by police on a charge of calling for an unsanctioned rally in relation to a planned nationwide protest on January 23 in support of the jailed Kremlin critic.
Sobol’s lawyer, Vladimir Voronin, tweeted on January 21 that police stopped his car and took his client to a police station to charge her there. Before that, three men had been at Sobol’s apartment and tried to hand her a written warning from the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office about the planned protest.
Earlier in the day, a lawyer with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, Vladlen Los, who is Belarusian citizen, was briefly detained and informed that he must leave Russia before January 25.
At a January 18 hearing that Navalny called a “mockery of justice,” a judge ruled to keep him incarcerated until February 15, by which time a different court is expected to decide whether to convert a suspended 3 1/2 year sentence he served in an embezzlement case, which he says is being trumped up into real jail time.
His team subsequently called for nationwide protests on January 23.
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The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has concluded that Russia committed rights violations — including torture and preventing people from returning to their homes — after a five-day war with Georgia in 2008, a ruling the Caucasus nation immediately hailed as a victory.
In its verdict made on January 21, the ECHR said that about 160 Georgian civilians captured by Russian troops faced “humiliating acts which had caused them suffering and had to be regarded as inhuman and degrading treatment”, adding that Georgian prisoners had been subjected to “arbitrary detention.”
The conflict erupted in August 2008 and ended after less than a week with Russian soldiers remaining in Georgia’s regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which Moscow then declared were independent states.
Georgia filed a lawsuit against Russia saying it violated the European Convention on Human Rights during the war and after it.
Russia has said it had to intervene to protect its citizens and peacekeepers from extermination by launching an operation against Georgia to bring about peace.
According to the ruling, “there had been an administrative practice…as regards the acts of torture of which the Georgian prisoners of war had been victims.”
The court also ruled that Russia was responsible for many Georgian nationals being prevented from returning to South Ossetia or Abkhazia after the war, and ordered Russia “to carry out an adequate and effective investigation” into such cases.
The ECHR stated that the events during the active phase of hostilities in the war had not fallen within Russia’s jurisdiction and declared this part of Georgia’s application inadmissible, as no side enjoyed effective control over the war-affected territories.
Despite part of the ruling going against Georgia, President Salome Zurabishvili hailed the court decision as a “victory for the whole of Georgia.”
“The (Georgian) state is recognized as a victim of this war and it is a great achievement for our country, our society, our history and for the future,” she said.
“It is the basis on which we must build our future and unity,” she added.
Just a small handful of other countries have followed Russia’s lead in recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s independence, while Tbilisi and other countries consider the two breakaway regions to be Georgian.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
European court of human rights: Moscow responsible for murder of civilians, and looting and burning of homes
Russia committed a series of human rights violations during its war with Georgia in 2008, the European court of human rights ruled on Thursday, saying Moscow was responsible for the murder of Georgian civilians, and the looting and burning of their homes.
In a landmark judgment, the court said the Kremlin was guilty of unlawfully rounding up ethnic Georgians and their subsequent “inhuman and degrading treatment”. This included the torture of Georgian prisoners of war and the expulsion of Georgian villagers from their homes in South Ossetia.
Related: Even in a Moscow jail, Alexei Navalny is dangerous to Putin
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
A pan-European human rights watchdog has expressed concern after a Russian court handed a long prison sentence for hooliganism to a university mathematics student who says he was tortured while in custody.
“The allegations we are hearing with regard to this case are certainly of concern, and we will continue to follow its development closely,” a spokeswoman at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) told RFE/RL on January 20, two days after 25-year-old Azat Miftakhov was sentenced to six years in prison.
“ODIHR is continually following the human rights situation in all 57 countries of the OSCE region, and frequently raises issues with individual states,” Katya Andrusz said.
The press service of the Council of Europe, the continent’s leading human rights organization, on Janaruy 19 said the organization was following the case “closely.”
A court in the Russian capital on January 18 found Miftakhov, a postgraduate student at Moscow State University, guilty of being involved in an arson attack on the ruling United Russia party’s office in Moscow in 2018.
Miftakhov has denied the charges, which his lawyers say stem from his anarchist beliefs and support for political prisoners.
A prominent Russian human rights organization, Memorial, has declared Miftakhov a political prisoner.
The student was arrested in early 2019 and accused of helping make an improvised bomb found in the city of Balashikha near Moscow.
He was released several days after the initial charge failed to hold, but was rearrested immediately and charged with being involved in the attack on the United Russia office in January 2018.
The Public Monitoring Commission, a human rights group, has said that Miftakhov’s body bore the signs of torture, which the student claimed were the result of investigators unsuccessfully attempting to force him to confess to the bomb-making charge.
Others who were detained along with Miftakhov but later released also claim to have been beaten by police.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
President-elect Joe Biden’s secretary of state nominee said the incoming administration would seek a “longer and stronger” nuclear agreement with Iran as he laid out a foreign policy vision for the next four years.
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Less than two hours after Aleksei Navalny was detained at passport control at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on January 17, the man who will hold one of the most important positions in the new White House made a statement on Twitter:
“Mr. Navalny should be immediately released, and the perpetrators of the outrageous attack on his life must be held accountable,” Jake Sullivan, who will become President Joe Biden’s national security adviser after the January 20 inauguration, wrote. “The Kremlin’s attacks on Mr. Navalny are not just a violation of human rights, but an affront to the Russian people who want their voices heard.”
Sullivan’s expression of support for the Russian anti-corruption activist was followed a few hours later by a statement from the departing U.S. secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who has frequently bashed Moscow on its human rights record, arms-control violations, and other issues.
But the speed with which a top official of the incoming Biden administration offered a public statement on Navalny, who was detained and jailed after returning to Russia for the first time since being hospitalized for exposure to a powerful nerve agent from the Novichok group, was itself unusual.
Moreover, Sullivan hadn’t even formally started his job yet.
Incoming national security adviser Jake Sullivan was quick to comment on Navalny’s arrest.
Add to that the fact that the Biden administration has already pledged to take a different course from the departing administration, where President Donald Trump’s conciliatory remarks often clashed with otherwise tough talk and punitive sanctions from other U.S. government agencies and officials, including Pompeo.
“The incoming Biden administration has long made it clear that it would pay more attention to human rights than Trump has. So the Biden team was ready for” Navalny’s arrest, Thomas Graham, the top Russia official in the White House under President George W. Bush, said.
“We can expect more criticism of Russia’s human rights record, but that will come with an offer for serious dialogue on strategic stability, as part of a policy that will likely be billed as ‘principled pragmatism’ with Moscow,” he told RFE/RL by e-mail.
During a hastily organized hearing at a suburban Moscow police station the morning after his detention, Navalny was ordered held for 30 days pending a court ruling on whether he violated terms of his parole while he was recuperating in Germany. The parole condition related to an earlier conviction on financial fraud charges he contends were fabricated.
Ever defiant, Navalny has called on his supporters to take to the streets in protest.
Single-person protests — the largest allowed by law in Russia — decried the arrest of Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny. Navalny has been placed in a cell in Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina detention center after a judge at a hastily arranged hearing ruled to keep the Kremlin critic in custody for 30 days following his dramatic airport arrest upon his arrival from Germany. He arrived late on January 17 from Berlin, where he had been recovering from a poison attack in August that Navalny says was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Even before Navalny’s detention, Biden’s advisers had suggested the case might be a priority. In September, in the heat of the U.S. presidential election campaign, after Germany confirmed that Navalny had been poisoned with a Novichok-like substance while traveling in Siberia, Biden himself bashed Moscow, calling the poisoning “outrageous” and “brazen.” Trump, meanwhile, dismissed the German conclusions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and other top officials have long displayed open disdain for U.S. statements on Russian policies, domestic or foreign; the case of Navalny, whose name Putin refuses to utter, is no exception.
That stance will likely harden further, something that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested in remarks on January 18 as Navalny was facing the makeshift hearing.
“Putin’s playing a game of chicken right now with the new Biden administration. In many ways, they are walking into their first major foreign-policy crisis,” Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, said in a radio interview. “And he’s waiting to see, do they just put in a few sanctions and then move on to other things, or do they do something radically different?”
Past Is Future?
Among the administration officials whose portfolios will include Russia policy are several veterans of the President Barack Obama’s administration, when the White House took a more openly confrontational approach toward Moscow.
That includes the nominee for the director of the CIA, William Burns, who served as ambassador to Russia in 2005-08 and as the No. 2 official at the State Department in 2011-14, under Obama.
And the person nominated to be undersecretary of state for political affairs, a post Burns has also held, was Victoria Nuland, whose Russia and Ukraine work during the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests in Kyiv irked the Kremlin.
“The United States can seize the moment of renewal at home and stagnation in Russia to stretch out a hand again. Putin may not want or be able to take it. But the Russian people should know that Washington and its allies are giving him and Russia a choice,” Nuland wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs in June.
Then-Assistant Secretary Of State For European And Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland speaks to the media during a press conference in Kyiv in April 2016.
A spokesman for the Biden administration’s transition team told RFE/RL that Sullivan’s tweet was the only statement the incoming team would be making for now.
Pavel Koshkin, a senior research fellow with the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, predicted the Biden administration would be tougher and more intransigent toward Moscow, but also try to find ways to improve relations. “However, it will be extremely difficult, because today Russia is seen as a hostile nation and a troublemaker rather than as a friend or a problem-solver,” he said in an analysis published last month by the Washington-based Wilson Center.
“Specifically, Washington will still view Russia as one of the key, though irresponsible, stakeholders in the international arena, including in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. This means that the United States will try to hold Russia accountable for its foreign and domestic policy,” he wrote.
Trust But Verify
As U.S.-Russian relations have continued to spiral downwards, and the Trump administration added yet more layers of sanctions on Russian individuals and companies, there’s been building pressure among Russia and foreign-policy experts in Washington to try and find some way to engage with Moscow.
The easiest and most immediate way is likely to be extending New START, the last major arms-control agreement capping the two countries’ nuclear arsenals, multiple experts have said. The treaty expires 16 days after Biden is inaugurated unless it is extended by mutual agreement.
While the Trump administration, which pulled the United States out of two arms treaties involving Moscow, has given mixed signals about how it wanted to deal with New START’s expiration, the Biden administration has signaled it was open to an immediate short-term extension. The Kremlin has said similar things.
“We will have to look at extending that treaty in the interest of the United States,” Sullivan told CNN on January 3.
Another urgent issue the Biden administration will grapple with is the massive recent hacking of U.S. federal agencies. Initial U.S. intelligence reports have pointed to Russian intelligence as the culprit. And the war in Ukraine, pitting Russian-backed militants against Ukrainian government forces, is nearing its eighth year.
William Burns attends a media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in July 2019.
Observers say a key question is whether the Kremlin, and the Biden White House, will compartmentalize subjects — Navalny’s arrest, for example — from another.
“The Biden administration can do both things at the same time, as long as it approaches both issues with care and direction. The Russians are not going to reject renewal of New START or the launching of serious, sustained talks on strategic stability simply because of human rights criticism,” Graham told RFE/RL.
However, the Navalny case has greater importance also because of the use of Novichok, a Soviet-designed nerve agent that is now prohibited under the international Chemical Weapons Convention, which Russia is a signatory to. Reporting by RFE/RL and other news organizations have pointed to the possibility that Russia has a secret, undeclared chemical-weapons program.
“Navalny’s poisoning will be, at least for the Americans, a matter relevant to strategic stability, because it gets at the issue of Moscow’s commitment to honor the treaties that it signs,” Graham said. “That said, excessive, gratuitous criticism of Russia’s human rights record will poison the atmosphere for any other conversations.”
Still another signal that the Biden administration is moving to embrace a more pragmatic approach appeared in a paper published by the Washington-based Center for a New American Security on January 14.
The paper argued that Washington should focus on how Russia and China are increasingly aligned, particularly in their disdain for U.S. foreign policy, and that U.S. policy makers should, among other things, try to drive a wedge between them.
Six days earlier, its lead co-author, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, was announced by Biden’s team as the incoming Russia officer for the White House National Security Council, which is to be headed by Sullivan. Previously, she was a top Russia officer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration.
“The United States should seek to change Russia’s calculus such that Moscow views some cooperation with the United States and Europe as possible and preferable to its growing subservience to China,” she wrote. “The United States should monitor and plan for, create headwinds to, and — where possible — pull at the seams in Russia-China relations.”
Kendall-Taylor did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Anti-Corruption Foundation of Aleksei Navalny issued a fresh investigation on January 19, shining a spotlight on a Black Sea mansion allegedly built for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Ankara,
Two prominent Democrats are urging the US Congress to probe outgoing President Donald Trump’s ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
“I would love to see his phone records to see if he was talking to Putin the day the insurgents invaded our Capitol,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on her podcast “You and Me Both,” referring to the day Trump supporters clashed with police, stormed the Congress, and caused the deaths of five people.
On the same podcast, Clinton’s guest Nancy Pelosi, the US House of Representatives speaker, said: “I don’t know what Putin has on him politically, financially or personally, but what happened last week was a gift to Putin because Putin wants to undermine democracy in our country and throughout the world.”
Calling the people who took part in the riot “Putin’s puppets,” she said there is strong support in Congress to open a probe into relations between Trump and Putin.
Clinton later wrote on Twitter “Speaker Pelosi and I agree,” adding: “Congress needs to establish an investigative body like the 9/11 Commission to determine Trump’s ties to Putin so we can repair the damage to our national security and prevent a puppet from occupying the presidency ever again.”
When the House voted on Jan. 13 to impeach Trump over incitement of insurrection for his alleged role in the riots, Trump became the first US president in history to be impeached twice.
A trial on the impeachment charges is expected to begin in the Senate sometime after President-elect Joe Biden takes office on Wednesday.
According to the Constitution of the US, only a sitting president can be impeached, says Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard University law professor. He calls Democratic Party’s attempts to impeach ”citizen” Trump ”plainly unconstitutional.”
In December 2019 the Democratic held House approved two articles of impeachment against Trump abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after he asked Ukraine that July to open investigations into Democratic front-runner Biden and later his refusal to participate in the House investigation of the matter.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
CHITA, Russia — Prosecutors have asked a military court in Siberia to sentence Private Ramil Shamsutdinov to 25 years in prison for killing eight fellow servicemen in a rampage he says was brought on by the hazing he suffered while being initiated into the army.
The Second Eastern Military District Court resumed the hearing into the high-profile case on January 19, where Shamsutdinov’s defense team reiterated that Shamsutdinov had gone on a shooting spree in October 2019, killing eight — including two high-ranking officers — in the town of Gorny in the Zabaikalye region after being tortured and beaten by other soldiers and officers during his induction into service.
On December 28, a jury found Shamsutdinov guilty of murder and attempted murder, but decided that he deserves leniency, which according to Russian law means that he may be sentenced to a maximum of 13 years and four months in prison.
The court’s officials told RFE/RL that Shamsutdinov’s sentence will be announced on January 21.
The case shocked many in Russia and attracted the attention of rights activists after Shamsutdinov claimed that he committed the act while suffering a nervous breakdown caused by what he had endured.
The Defense Ministry accepted at the time that Shamsutdinov “had a conflict” with one of the officers he killed. In March, Private Ruslan Mukhatov was found guilty of bullying Shamsutdinov and was handed a suspended two-year prison term.
Deadly shootings at Russia’s military units as the result of widespread hazing have been a focus of human rights organizations for years.
In November, a soldier at a military air base in the country’s western region of Voronezh shot an officer and two soldiers dead.
In recent years, photos and video footage have been posted online by members of the Russian military that show the severe bullying of young recruits as they are inducted into the army.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A police officer in the Russian city of Samara has been placed under house arrest on suspicion of leaking data that may have helped the Bellingcat investigative group identify the alleged poisoners of Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny, the RBC business daily reports, citing its sources.
Police officer Kirill Chuprov was detained in December and charged with abuse of power, according to an RBC report from January 19.
Chuprov, who may face up to 10 years in prison if convicted, is accused of leaking confidential information from a database containing information about the movement of people across Russia to a third party, according to the RBC source, who is said to be close to the investigation, said.
The leaked data was later used by investigative journalists who studied flights taken by agents of Russian’s Federal Security Service (FSB) who allegedly secretly followed Navalny for several years before he was poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent in Siberia in August last year.
Bellingcat, a British-based open-source investigative group, and Russian media outlet The Insider published the investigation in December in cooperation with Der Spiegel and CNN.
Citing “voluminous evidence in the form of telecoms and travel data,” the investigation, showed the August 2020 poisoning of the Kremlin critic appeared to have been in the works since at least early 2017.
The European Union and Britain have imposed asset freezes and travel bans against six senior Russian officials believed to be responsible for the Navalny poisoning, as well as one entity involved in the program that has produced a group of military-grade nerve agents known as Novichok.
Navalny, who was transported from Siberia to Germany for treatment after the incident, returned to Moscow on January 17. He was immediately arrested and sent to a pretrial detention center.
On February 2, a court is expected to decide whether to convert into jail time a suspended 3 1/2 year sentence, which Navalny served in an embezzlement case that he says was trumped up.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
1 A man in Novosibirsk holds a poster saying, “Putin is afraid of Navalny.” This is one of dozens of photos shared by the Team Navalny Twitter account of individual protesters holding placards in cities throughout Russia.
2 Izhevsk: “(Putin), you spit, we wipe it off. We spit and you will drown. Freedom for Navalny!”
3 Belgorod: “Hey, release Aleksei Navalny!”
4 Izhevsk: “Granddad, take your pills or you’ll be smacked on the bum. Freedom for Navalny.”
5 Kaliningrad: “Freedom for Navalny and all political prisoners”
6 Izhevsk: “One for all, all for one”
7 St. Petersburg: “Freedom for Navalny! Putin to court!”
8 Samara: “Cowards”
9 Moscow: “Freedom for Aleksei Navalny”
10 Izhevsk: “Freedom for Navalny. For those who wanted to kill him — to justice”
11 Samara: “Freedom for Aleksei Navalny”
12 Izhevsk: “Today Navalny, tomorrow — you!”
13 St. Petersburg: “We demand freedom for Navalny.”
14 St. Petersburg: “Freedom for Navalny”
15 Moscow: “For Navalny!”
16 Kaliningrad: “Release Navalny.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Parler, a social media website popular with U.S. right-wing groups, has partially returned online with the apparent help of a Russina-based technology company, according to reports on January 18.
The far-right-friendly social network went offline on January 11 after being kicked off Amazon Web Services (AWS) over allegations it failed to properly police violent content.
Messages of support for the violence that shocked the United States in the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol and calls for new protests had flourished on the platform before the AWS move and led Apple and Google to remove the Parler app from their stores.
Parler’s website was reachable again on January 18, but only with a message from its chief saying he was working to restore its functionality. Messaging services were not active.
The Internet protocol address it used is owned by DDos-Guard, which is controlled by two Russian men, according to Reuters and Dave Temkin, vice president of network and systems at Netflix.
“Parler is back up, and being hosted by “DDOS GUARD” out of Russia,” Temkin said on Twitter. “If that’s not an obvious sign of its malfeasance, there’s nothing else that could possibly be shown to convince you.”
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials have said Russia has meddled in U.S. elections through propaganda efforts and hacking aimed at stoking political divisions, manipulating public opinion, and supporting outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump. Russia has denied the allegations.
DDos-Guard generally provides services such as protection from distributed denial of service attacks, Reuters quoted infrastructure expert Ronald Guilmette as saying.
Parler CEO John Matze and representatives of DDoS-Guard did not reply to requests for comment, Reuters said.
In an update on January 18, Parler.com linked to a Fox News interview in which Matze said he was “confident” Parler would return at the end of January.
DDoS-Guard has worked with racist, right-wing, and conspiracy sites that have been used to share messages, and it has also supported Russian government sites, Reuters said.
DDoS-Guard’s website lists an address in Scotland under the company name Cognitive Cloud LP, but Guilmette told Reuters that it is owned by two men in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
Temkin’s tweet included a screen shot of Parler’s URL registration that also lists Rostov-on-Don as the address.
Parler filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon last week after AWS cut off its service, but Amazon defended its decision because Parler had shown an “unwillingness and inability” to remove violent content.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said Parler could return to the App Store if it changes how it moderates posts.
Cook justified the suspension because of “the incitement to violence,” but on January 17 said on Fox News: “We’ve only suspended them. So, if they get their moderation together, they would be back on” the App Store.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
For more than a decade, Aleksei Navalny has been one of President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken and influential critics in Russia, investigating high-level corruption, organizing protests, and traveling across the country to back opposition candidates in regional elections and nurture his network of political activists.
Navalny’s arrest has failed to rouse the population as a whole.”
Authorities have responded with a campaign of near-constant harassment, jailing the Kremlin critic almost a dozen times since 2011, repeatedly raiding the offices of his Anti-Corruption Foundation, and — Navalny asserts — staging an attempted assassination by means of poisoning that led to his extended convalescence in Germany since August.
When he announced he would return to Russia on January 17, authorities made clear their intention to jail the Kremlin critic. That evening, Navalny was detained at the airport after arrival and taken to a police station outside Moscow, where he appeared before an improvised courtroom and a state prosecutor asked the judge to jail him pending a separate hearing on whether he violated the terms of his earlier parole.
But striking footage from the previous evening continued to circulate online, showing riot police dispersing and detaining Navalny supporters as they awaited his expected arrival at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, and cars being blocked from exiting the area once news emerged that his flight was being rerouted to another airport, Sheremetyevo.
[The Kremlin] fears the man with no name.”
The Kremlin has denied involvement in the August poisoning —despite evidence from open-source investigations that it was carried out by the Federal Security Service (FSB) — and has gone out of its way to downplay Navalny’s significance as a politician, with Putin calling him “the Berlin patient” and “the man in question” to avoid even uttering his name. But the scenes sparked by Navalny’s repatriation, analysts say, expose the very real challenge he presents for the Kremlin and the reasons why authorities have moved so fast to jail him.
“The Kremlin has shown that for all its pretense of disinterest, it fears the man with no name,” Russia expert Mark Galeotti wrote in a column.
Navalny has made a name for himself despite facing what is arguably the Russian state’s most powerful political weapon: a network of state-controlled TV channels that are well-funded, often take cues directly from the Kremlin, and have baselessly painted him as a Western agent. A September poll by the independent Levada Center found that a majority of Russians see his poisoning as a publicity stunt, with only 15 percent blaming the Kremlin, despite the evidence of its complicity.
Police detain participants of a protest in support of Navalny in St.Petersburg on January 18.
Nevertheless, millions have watched his video investigations alleging corruption among associates of Putin, and thousands across the country have heeded his call to attend anti-government protests several times in recent years. But after his poisoning, few Russians took to the streets in protest. And restrictions associated with the coronavirus pandemic and an accelerating clampdown on dissent in Russia have contributed to a widespread sense, surveys show, that demonstrating against injustice is too often a futile activity.
“Navalny’s arrest has failed to rouse the population as a whole,” wrote political analyst Vladislav Inozemtsev. “That’s sad, but you can’t ignore it.”
On January 18, at Navalny’s hearing outside Moscow, the judge overseeing proceedings inside the police station holding the opposition leader returned after more than 45 minutes to deliver her ruling. She ordered Navalny jailed for 30 days, long past an expected January 29 hearing regarding his alleged parole violation. Lawyers say the outcome of that process could be a 3 1/2 -year prison sentence, and Navalny could be hit with additional charges that carry a sentence of up to 10 years.
Before being led away, Navalny addressed Russians with a call for mass protests across the country on January 23 — throwing down the gauntlet both to a Kremlin reluctant to acknowledge his influence and to a population that he hopes will brave the winter cold, and a likely police crackdown, to demand his freedom.
“Don’t be scared,” Navalny said in a video posted from the makeshift courtroom, sitting against the backdrop of a folded Russian flag. “Take to the streets.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny said a hearing he faced at a police station on January 18 was a mockery of justice and called for street protests, as Western leaders demanded his release. Navalny was detained the previous evening at a Moscow airport after returning from Germany. He was being treated in Berlin after being nearly killed with a military-grade poison in an attack that an investigation showed was carried out by Russian security service officers.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A Turkish rescue team has found the bodies of four crew members of a Ukrainian-owned cargo ship that sank in bad weather in the Black Sea over the weekend, including the vessel’s captain, a Russian citizen.
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Russia has launched a mass coronavirus vaccination campaign opened to all Russians in a bid to stem the spread of the virus without reimposing a new nationwide lockdown.
Dozens of Moscow residents lined up on January 18 at a mobile clinic set up at the GUM department store on Red Square, where they received their first shot of the locally developed Sputnik-V vaccine.
Russia, which has the world’s fourth-highest number of COVID-19 cases, began large-scale vaccinations last month, initially for people in key professions such as medical workers and teachers, even though the inoculation was still in its third phase of clinical trials.
Last week, President Vladimir Putin instructed officials to open up the inoculation program to the rest of the country’s population of 146 million, and to boost production of its vaccine.
Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said on January 18 that authorities planned to vaccinate more than 20 million Russians against COVID-19 in the first quarter of the year.
But while the vaccine has been widely available in Moscow, with vaccination centers located at prominent sites in the capital, reports said most regions have reported receiving fewer than 5,000 doses so far.
Unlike many European countries, Russia has refrained from reimposing a strict nationwide lockdown despite being hit by a second wave of infections.
Russian health authorities have reported more than 3.5 million coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, with over 66,000 deaths. However, the death toll is believed to be much higher.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has expelled two Dutch diplomats in a tit-for-tat move after the expulsion for espionage of two Russian diplomats from The Hague last month.
The ministry said in a statement on January 18 that, “guided by the principle of reciprocity,” the Dutch acting charge d’affaires, Joost Reintjes, had been summoned to a meeting where he was informed of the decision to expel the two diplomats.
The dispute started on December 10, when the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) said it was expelling two unidentified Russians who were seeking information on artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and nanotechnology.
The AIVD added that the two men worked for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).
Russia’s embassy in The Hague at the time said the Netherlands had presented no evidence of unlawful acts by the Russian diplomats and the Foreign Ministry said in its statement on January 18 that the allegations were “unfounded and slanderous.”
It added that the two Dutch diplomats had two weeks to leave Russia.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny appeared at a hearing on January 18, the day after he was detained at a Moscow airport upon his arrival from Germany. He was being treated in Berlin after being poisoned in Russia in August. His spokeswoman posted a video of Navalny speaking at the hearing, which he labeled “the highest degree of lawlessness.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A court in Moscow has handed down a six-year prison sentence for hooliganism to Azat Miftakhov, a postgraduate mathematics student at the Moscow State University who says he was tortured while in custody.
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The United States has added its condemnation to the detention of Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny as he arrived in Moscow from Germany.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a statement on January 17 also demanded the “immediate and unconditional release” of the Kremlin critic and said Navalny “is not the problem.”
Pompeo said the United States noted Navalny’s detention with “grave concern,” calling it “the latest in a series of attempts to silence Navalny and other opposition figures and independent voices who are critical of Russian authorities.”
Pompeo added that confident political leaders “do not fear competing voices, nor commit violence against or wrongfully detain political opponents” and urged the Russian government to provide a level playing field for all political parties and candidates.
He said the Russian people “deserve a government that supports an open marketplace of ideas, transparent and accountable governance, an independent judiciary, and the ability to exercise their basic human rights of speech and assembly without fear of retribution.”
Earlier on January 17, the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden called for Navalny’s immediate release and that “the perpetrators of the outrageous attack on his life must be held accountable.”
“The Kremlin’s attacks on Mr. Navalny are not just a violation of human rights, but an affront to the Russian people who want their voices heard,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s incoming national security adviser, said in a tweet.
Navalny arrived in the evening on January 17 in Moscow from Germany, where he was being treated after being poisoned in Siberia last August and was promptly detained by law enforcement authorities at the airport.
The detention sparked immediate outrage from European governments and human rights organizations.
European Council President Charles Michel called the apprehension of the opposition politician “unacceptable” and demanded his immediate release.
“The detainment of Alexei Navalny upon arrival in Moscow is unacceptable,” Michel, who coordinates EU governments in Brussels, said in a tweet. “I call on Russian authorities to immediately release him.”
The 44-year-old Kremlin critic, who Amnesty International called a “prisoner of conscience,” was poisoned last summer by what tests at Western laboratories showed was a Novichok nerve agent. He was flown to Germany for emergency medical care after being poisoned.
Navalny, who has been jailed numerous times in Russia for organizing and leading anti-government protests, blames the poisoning on Russian authorities. Moscow denies any involvement.
The poisoning, which was similar to the near-fatal attack on Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in 2018 in the English city of Salisbury, drew wide international attention, as did Navalny’s planned return after Russia’s prison authority warned it Navalny could be jailed for 3.5 years for allegedly flouting the terms of a suspended prison sentence.
In a joint statement upon the news of Navalny’s detention, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia — all former Soviet republics — issued a call for the “imposition of restrictive measures” against Moscow.
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis added in a tweet that the detention of Navalny “by the Russian authorities is completely unacceptable. We demand his immediate release.”
“(The) EU should act swiftly and if he is not released, we need to consider imposition of restrictive measures in response to this blatant act,” he added.
Czech Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek called Navalny’s detention a “politically motivated” action and said he was being held “for his views, not what he was formally accused of.”
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki also called for “a swift and unequivocal response at the EU level” if Navalny is not released.
France’s Foreign Ministry said it “takes note with great concern of the arrest” and called for Navalny’s immediate release.
Italy’s foreign minister also called for Navalny’s immediate release.
“The arrest of Navalny on his arrival in Russia is a very serious matter, which concerns us. We ask for his immediate release. And we expect his rights to be respected,” Luigi Di Maio said on Twitter.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.