MOSCOW — Aleksandr Vorobyov, who worked as an assistant to President Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Urals region, has been sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison on a charge of high treason.
The Moscow City Court sentenced Vorobyov on April 14 after a trial that was held behind closed doors due to classified materials in the case.
Vorobyov was detained in July 2019 and fired shortly after the arrest.
His chief, Nikolai Tsukanov, left the post of presidential envoy in the Ural Federal District more than a year after Vorobyov was charged with high treason.
At the time, Tsukanov was a member of Russia’s Security Council, the State Border Commission, and the Presidential Council on Priority Projects. He quit those posts after his aide’s arrest.
Media reports at the time said that investigators had found a Polish passport and a recording device in Vorobyov’s possession at the time of his arrest.
Vorobyov was stripped of the rank of state councilor of the third degree, which corresponds to the military rank of major general, and expelled from the ruling United Russia party.
The affair was the first publicly known case of a government official being arrested on suspicions of treason in post-Soviet Russia.
Since then, the number of cases of alleged high treason in general has increased dramatically in Russia.
One of the latest high-profile high treason cases involves Ivan Safronov, a journalist and an aide to the Russian Roskosmos space agency chief, Dmitry Rogozin.
Safronov was arrested on July 7 and later charged with passing classified material to the Czech Republic. He has denied the charge.
KRASNODAR, Russia — Police in the Russian city of Krasnodar have detained several members of the local team of jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny for unclear reasons amid ongoing crackdown on the network of Navalny’s teams across the country.
The coordinator of the team, Anastasia Panchenko, told RFE/RL that traffic police stopped a car transporting her and two colleagues as they were traveling to a location to shoot a documentary.
Police took the activists to the Krasnodar city police department for what they called “a check.” When the activists said they would not go, the officers threatened them with a charge of disobeying a police order.
Panchenko said lawyer Feliks Vertegel is representing their interests at this point.
Activists associated with Navalny have been under pressure since the 44-year-old outspoken Kremlin-critic was incarcerated in February.
The coordinator of Navalny’s team in the North Caucasus region of Daghestan, Eduard Atayev, and his assistant Murad Manapov, were detained on unspecified administrative charges on April 12 and April 13 respectively, after the team was established over the weekend, Navalny’s associate Ruslan Ablyakimov told RFE/RL.
Earlier in February, an initial attempt to set up Navalny’s team in Makhachkala failed after its coordinator-to-be, Ruslan Ablyakimov, was attacked and beaten by unidentified individuals after he arrived in the region from Moscow.
The coordinator of the network of Navalny’s teams across Russia, Leonid Volkov, has said that, despite Navalny’s incarceration, the teams will continue their work to derail the ruling United Russia party’s stranglehold on power in parliamentary elections in September.
Navalny and his supporters have developed a “smart voting” system, which is aimed at undercutting United Russia candidates.
Under the system, voters can enter their address into a special app, which will then give them a list of the candidates deemed most likely to defeat their United Russia rivals regardless of their party affiliation.
Navalny was imprisoned after returning to Russia in January from his recuperation in Germany after he survived a poison attack last August in Siberia. He has accused President Vladimir Putin of ordering his assassination, something the Kremlin denies.
Navalny has complained of back pain and numbness in his hands and legs and has accused prison authorities of withholding adequate medical treatment.
He declared a hunger strike in late March, raising even more concerns about his overall health.
The State Committee for National Security (UKMK) said on April 14 that Kazakpaev and another person identified only by his initials, M.T., had been detained the previous day.
Due to classified materials in the case, no further details were made public. If found guilty, the two men may face up to 10 years in prison.
KEMEROVO, Russia — Prosecutors in the Siberian city of Kemerovo have asked a court to sentence two Jehovah’s Witnesses to five years in prison each as Russia continues its crackdown on the religious group.
The group said the prosecutor had requested the Zavodskoi district court to hand down the jail terms to 60-year-old Sergei Yavushkin and 46-year-old Aleksandr Bondarchuk. The defendants are expected to give their final statements in the trial on April 16, after which Judge Vera Ulyanyuk will announce her decision.
The case against Yavushkin and Bondarchuk was launched in July 2019. They were charged with organizing the activities of “a banned, extremist group” and placed under house arrest at the time, because of which they lost their jobs.
It was said at the trial, which started almost exactly a year ago, that charges against the defendants were based on materials provided by a person who had actively taken part in the prayers and Bible studies of the religious group and secretly recorded the sessions with the intention of turning over the materials to investigators.
Since the faith was outlawed in Russia, many Jehovah’s Witnesses have been imprisoned in the country and in Russia-annexed Crimea.
The United States has condemned Moscow’s ongoing crackdown on Jehovah’s Witnesses and other peaceful religious minorities.
For decades, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have been viewed with suspicion in Russia, where the dominant Orthodox Church is championed by President Vladimir Putin.
The Christian group is known for door-to-door preaching, close Bible study, rejecting military service, and not celebrating national and religious holidays or birthdays.
According to the group, dozens of Jehovah’s Witnesses have either been convicted of extremism or are being held in pretrial detention.
The Moscow-based Memorial Human Rights Center has recognized dozens of Jehovah’s Witnesses who’ve been charged with or convicted of extremism as political prisoners.
A bipartisan U.S. task force has published a road map for a foreign policy and national-security strategy prioritizing the advancement of democracy and the fight against authoritarianism in China, Russia, and elsewhere.
In a report published on April 14, the task force convened last year by Freedom House, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and the McCain Institute said that “the rise of authoritarianism, coupled with the erosion of democracy, threatens global stability, America’s economic and security alliances, and respect for human dignity.”
“This alarming confluence requires an urgent, bold, generational response,” the task force — comprising leaders, experts, and former policy makers — insisted, saying “increasingly repressive and aggressive China” is using “economic, military, and diplomatic coercion to undermine democratic governance and advance its influence in Asia and beyond.”
Meanwhile, Russia “foments division and insecurity in established and struggling democracies, especially those close to its borders, viewing the spread of democracy as an existential threat,” according to the report.
Both Beijing and Moscow “seek to advance their interests by undermining the rules-based liberal international order that the United States and its allies have superintended for three-quarters of a century, and which constrains their ambitions,” it said.
“We are living through a historically unprecedented rate of technological, economic, demographic, and geopolitical change, and that instability has created space for authoritarians around the world to flourish,” said Freedom House President Michael J. Abramowitz, who urged the U.S. administration to “reverse this frightening trend before it’s too late.”
In its annual report released in March, Freedom House said that the coronavirus pandemic, economic uncertainty, and conflicts across the world contributed to the decline of global freedom in 2020. The Washington-based human rights watchdog said that the number of countries designated “not free” was at its highest level in 15 years.
In its inaugural report, the Task Force on U.S. Strategy to Support Democracy and Counter Authoritarianism recommended seven “interrelated strategies” to reverse “the rising tide against freedom” that would include making democracy and countering authoritarianism a priority for U.S. diplomatic engagement by “galvanizing an international coalition to push back against authoritarian threats and reinforce democratic governance.”
“The United States and its democratic partners should make clear that authoritarian governments in China, Russia, and elsewhere seek to divide and undermine democracies while denying their own citizens’ fundamental rights,” the task force said.
Viewing democracy as “a threat to their authoritarian model,” China and Russia “seek to prop up like-minded autocrats in other countries, especially those facing popular pushback.”
The report called on the United States and its partners to “dramatically increase investment in the pillars of open, accountable, inclusive, democratic society: free and fair elections; independent media; and a vibrant, active civil society.”
That would include investing in “a large-scale Enterprise Fund for Independent Media to promote free expression and quality journalism internationally.”
The United States should also develop a strategy to counter intentional disinformation, state-sponsored propaganda, unintended misinformation, online hate, and harassment whose “rampant spread” is interfering with basic democratic processes.
“State actors like Russia and China have been using disinformation globally for years as part of a broader malign influence strategy to sow chaos, amplify internal divisions, discredit critics, and decrease trust in the democratic process,” according to the report.
For instance, the Russian government uses traditional outlets such as the state-owned multilingual news services RT and Sputnik, as well as social media, to “exploit divisions” in Europe — especially the Balkans — and in Africa, Latin America, and the Asia- Pacific region.
The task force called the fight against corruption and kleptocracy a “fundamental pillar” of the U.S. national security strategy.
Foreign aid and security assistance should be distributed in ways that help reduce corruption and promote private investment in countries showing progress in countering corruption, which “harms effective governance, undermines economic growth, and weakens the rule of law.”
The report noted that corruption in Russia “plays an increasingly large role in regime stability,” with President Vladimir Putin being able to consolidate his power by allowing key political elites to benefit from graft. The Kremlin also uses corruption to “undermine democracy in Europe and counter U.S. influence in the world.”
Washington should also negotiate economic agreements that set high standards for governance and democracy, as well as use development finance and U.S. leadership in multilateral development banks to “boost inclusive growth and a sustainable recovery; incentivize democratic governance; and avoid debt traps, while demonstrating that democracy can deliver,” the report concluded.
MINSK — Yuras Zyankovich, a Belarusian lawyer who also has U.S. citizenship, has been detained in Moscow and transferred to a detention center in Minsk amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent in Belarus following a disputed presidential election last year.
Zyankovich’s wife, Alena Dzenisavets, told RFE/RL on April 13 that Russian security officers “abducted” her husband from the Nordic Rooms Hotel in Moscow on April 11 and brought him to the Belarusian capital.
“I learned about that only yesterday. I talked to a manager of the hotel. According to him, the hotel’s personnel saw how men in civilian clothes took Yuras away, saying that he was suspected of terrorism. They showed their documents saying that they are from security organs,” Dzenisavets said, adding that Zyankovich is currently in the detention center for the Belarusian Committee of State Security (KGB) in Minsk.
Yuras Zyankovich, who used to be a regional leader of the opposition Belarusian Popular Front (BNF) party and once sought to be its presidential candidate, has been living in the United States since 2007.
He is a graduate of Fordham University’s School of Law in New York and is permanently based in Houston, Texas. Zyankovich frequently visits Belarus and actively takes part in the country’s political life.
On April 12, the day of Zyankovich’s detention in Moscow, a noted Belarusian political analyst, Alyaksandr Fyaduta, went incommunicado in the Russian capital, where he works as a media consultant.
Moscow police said at the time that they had started looking for him after his relatives raised concerns about his whereabouts.
On April 13, the Belarusian KGB said that Fyaduta is in custody in Minsk.
The KGB statement said that Fyaduta and BNF chairman Ryhor Kastusyou were being held on unspecified charges, adding that detailed information on the cases will be provided later.
Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who has ruled the country since 1994, was declared the landslide winner in the August election, which was widely viewed as rigged in his favor.
Thousands of citizens took to the streets for months to protest the results, saying Lukashenka’s challenger, Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, actually won the election.
Tsikhanouskaya left Belarus for Lithuania after the election for security reasons, while Lukashenka has directed a brutal postelection crackdown in which almost 30,000 have been detained, hundreds beaten, several killed, and journalists targeted.
Many other senior opposition figures have also left or were forced to leave Belarus, fearing for their safety, while several of those who haven’t left have been detained by security officials.
Moscow police have searched the offices and homes of editors of the student magazine Doxa over a January video related to unsanctioned rallies to protest the incarceration of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny.
The magazine said on Telegram that the searches were conducted on April 14 in the magazine’s offices and the homes of Doxa editors Armen Aramyan, Vladimir Metyolkin, Natalya Tyshkevich and Alla Gutnikova.
Police told Leonid Solovyov, a lawyer for the Agora human rights group, that they plan to take Aramyan to the Investigative Committee for questioning.
Tyshkevich was informed that she is suspected of “violating the law on engaging minors in actions that might be dangerous.”
According to Doxa, the searches were conducted over a video that the magazine deleted at the request of the Roskomnadzor media watchdog request in January.
The video was about students being warned about the possible repercussions they face for participating in unsanctioned rallies held on January 23 and January 31 against the arrest of Kremlin critic Navalny.
More than 10,000 supporters of Navalny were detained across Russia during and after the January rallies. Many of the detained were either fined or handed several-day jail terms. At least 90 were charged with criminal offenses; several have been fired by their employers.
Human rights groups have called on Moscow repeatedly to stop targeting journalists because they are covering the protests or expressing solidarity with protesters, since both are protected under the right to freedom of expression.
“Instead of targeting journalists, the authorities should hold accountable police who attack journalists and interfere with their work,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement on February 3.
Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport on January 17 upon his arrival from Germany, where he was recovering from a poisoning in Siberia in August 2020 that several European laboratories concluded was from a military-grade chemical nerve agent.
Navalny has insisted that his poisoning was ordered directly by President Vladimir Putin, which the Kremlin has denied.
In February, a Moscow court ruled that, while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered as being politically motivated. Navalny’s 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from the case was converted to a jail term, though the court said he will serve 2 1/2 years in prison given the amount of time he had been held in detention.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is calling on Kyrgyz authorities to investigate the harassment of journalists working for independent outlets while they were covering the country’s nationwide constitutional referendum on April 11.
Police detained at least four journalists covering voting in the southern city of Osh and in the capital, Bishkek, while election onlookers attacked at least one reporter in Osh, the New York-based media freedom watchdog said in a statement on April 13.
Kyrgyz authorities must investigate the police detentions and ensure that “all members of the press can cover events of national significance freely and safely,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator.
“If Kyrgyzstan’s elections are to be seen as free, fair, and legitimate, journalists must be able to cover them freely and without fear of detention and harassment,” she said.
In Osh, a group of people confronted two correspondents for the independent news website Kloop, Bekmyrza Isakov and Aliyma Alymova, while they were trying to interview a group of voters at a polling station, according to CPJ.
It cited news reports and Ayzirek Almazbekova, coordinator of Kloop’s election-monitoring program, as saying that the group called the journalists “traitors,” with one woman pushing Isakov, striking him in the arm, and taking his phone.
When Isakov took out a second cell phone to film the altercation, a man in the group stole it as well, along with the phone of a volunteer election monitor who was assisting the Kloop team.
Police officers who were present at the scene only intervened after the woman who struck Isakov refused to return the phones except at a police station, according to reports, which said that the two journalists, the election monitor, and the woman were taken to a police station for questioning.
The woman filed a complaint accusing the journalists of “hooliganism”; the journalists filed a countercomplaint, Almazbekova said.
Police later returned the two cell phones to the journalists, who were released without charge. However, police kept the election monitor’s phone.
Police in Osh also detained a reporter with the independent news website Eldik.media, Ayarbek Joldoshbaev, while he was filming at another polling station, according to news reports and an Eldik.media representative.
Police told Joldoshbaev that he did not have permission from the polling station’s chairman to film there and held the journalist for about an hour at a police station.
Authorities are continuing to investigate the case, according to Eldik.media.
In the capital, Bishkek, a Kloop reporter was detained while she was filming at a polling station, according to Almazbekova.
She said the journalist, Aijan Avazbekova, was held for at least two hours and was released after giving a statement.
In both Joldoshbayev and Avazbekova’s detentions, police reportedly claimed that the journalists lacked the necessary permission to film.
But under Kyrgyz laws, media workers have the right to film within polling stations during elections and referendums, CPJ said.
VOLOGDA, Russia — Savely Narizhny is a 15-year-old former high school student in the northwestern Russian city of Vologda. On the evening of January 23, he was stopped in the center of the city after attending an unsanctioned mass demonstration in support of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who at the time was jailed and facing serious criminal charges. Narizhny wasn’t detained, but police confiscated his telephone. Three days later, police came for him at home.
Narizhny admits that he wrote graffiti calling longtime authoritarian President Vladimir Putin a “thief” on the wall of the regional administration headquarters. A short time later, prosecutors categorized the act as “an action committed by a group of people and motivated by political, ideological, race-based, nationalist, or religious hatred or enmity.” If convicted, he could face up to three years in prison.
After the criminal charges were filed, Narizhny was called into the administration of his school. Officials pressured him into withdrawing from the school.
“They told me, ‘we don’t need criminals’ and so on,” Narizhny told RFE/RL. “‘It will be better for you to withdraw of your own volition.’”
Now he attends classes at night school while awaiting trial.
During the wave of protests in support of Navalny and against Putin’s government in January and February, Russian officials and state-controlled media — noting the relative youthfulness of the movement — regularly accused the opposition of luring minors
“It’s absolutely unacceptable to thrust minors forward,” Putin said. “After all, that’s what terrorists do.”
Leading state television moderator Dmitry Kiselyov railed against the opposition on his prime-time show, accusing them of “pulling children into politics like political pedophiles.” Opposition supporters, however, were quick to create a video that overlaid Kiselyov’s tirade with a montage of photographs of small children attending events organized by the ruling United Russia party.
In the weeks since the demonstrations, local officials across the country have cracked down on young people — not just minors — who participated in the demonstrations. Many have found themselves facing expulsion from their educational institutions, serious criminal charges, or — as in Narizhny’s case — both.
Also caught up in the post-protest crackdown in Vologda was 17-year-old Ilya Yelshin. A self-confessed bad student at the Spassky Middle School, Yelshin spent most of his time cultivating his quirky YouTube channel featuring videos of him, for instance, watching a single clip by Russian rapper Morgenshtern for more than six hours or strolling around in temperatures of -20 degrees Celsius wearing just a t-shirt and jeans.
‘Getting Upset’
In January, however, as Navalny was preparing to return from Germany where he’d spent weeks recuperating from an August nerve-agent poisoning that he says was carried out by Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives at the behest of Putin and the government was threatening to arrest him if he appeared in Russia, Yelshin began including political content on his channel, including surveying other youths about whether they supported Navalny or Putin.
On January 23, he published a YouTube livestream from the Navalny demonstration in Vologda.
Pro-Navalny demonstrators march in Vologda on January 23.
“I started getting upset about what was happening in Russia at that moment. And things are still bad, as a matter of fact,” he told RFE/RL. “The protests started, and I began looking into things. Russia’s problems, Putin….”
Although teachers had lectured students before the protest about the “danger” of participating in such activities, nothing happened to Yelshin during the demonstration. The next day, however, two plainclothes police showed up at his house and warned him that he was the target of a criminal investigation. Shortly thereafter, he was summoned to the regional prosecutor’s office.
“Don’t you understand that you are putting your life in danger by getting involved in this?” the prosecutor asked him, according to an audio recording that Yelshin made surreptitiously and posted on social media. “You are being used. You don’t even understand how they are using you.”
“And have you thought about how you are being used?” Yelshin retorted.
Navalny’s supporters called for another major protest on January 31. Shortly before that date, Yelshin posted a video in which he said: “If you want to go, go. But think carefully many times before you decide not to go.”
According to Yelshin’s lawyer, Sergei Tikhonov, the director of Yelshin’s school telephoned the police to report that video and soon his real troubles began.
Spassky Middle School Director Lyudmila Guseva declined to be interviewed for this article.
Vologda politician Yevgeny Domozhirov, who is a member of the Central Council of Navalny’s Party of Progress, posted an image of the police report of Guseva’s call dated January 29.
He accuses Guseva of hypocrisy for warning students not to get involved in politics while, at the same time, welcoming the United Russia party into her school.
“It is enough to go onto the school’s webpage and to see there the constant reposts from the party of crooks and thieves and photographs of their events at the school,” Domozhirov wrote, using the dismissive moniker that Navalny coined to refer to United Russia, in a blog post that featured numerous links to such posts from the Spassky school’s social media pages.
‘It Will Only Get Worse’
Yelshin was detained at the January 31 demonstration. Police treated him as an “organizer” of the protest because of the video that Guseva had flagged for them. In the end, he was fined 20,000 rubles ($260) on that count and 10,000 rubles ($130) for participating in a second unsanctioned demonstration. In addition, his parents were fined 100 rubles ($1.30) for “failing to fulfill their parental obligations.”
Within days, Yelshin — like Narizhny — was summoned to the school administration and pressured to withdraw.
“‘Ilyusha, of course we aren’t forcing you to do anything, but it would be better if you withdrew,’” Yelshin said he was told. “They told me: ‘You know yourself that it will only get worse.’”
Since he left school, Yelshin said, he has more time to work on his YouTube channel. Among other things, he posted a video about how he was “driven out of school.”
“Now I am no longer a student,” he said. “I don’t study anywhere. In short, I’m a bum.”
Student Vera Inozemtseva was expelled from university for attending a pro-Navalny protest in Astrakhan on January 23.
In the southern Russian city of Astrakhan, 22-year-old Vera Inozemtseva and two other students were expelled from Astrakhan State University for attending the Navalny protest in that city on January 23. She said that after the demonstration she was “abducted” by plainclothes police officers who took her telephone and used it to post incriminating messages on her social media accounts.
“I was taken from room to room,” she said of her time at a police station that evening, “and finally I was brought to a room and an officer from Center E came in.” Center E is the Interior Ministry department responsible for combating extremism, which has been widely criticized for cracking down on peaceful political dissent.
“I tried to find out what was the legal grounds for this conversation and where my telephone was, but the officer didn’t answer my questions and just asked me why I don’t like Putin,” she added. She said she was returned home by three masked men in an unmarked car. One of them asked her, “You are going to behave now, right?”
“I answered that I would complain to the prosecutor’s office,” she said. As soon as the masked men let her go, two uniformed police officers walked up to her and ordered her to go with them.
‘I Don’t Want To Quit’
“I thought that maybe I had gone out of my mind or that I was in the middle of a nightmare,” she said. In the end, she was fined 10,000 rubles for participating in the demonstration.
She filed her complaint with prosecutors on January 24, but the Investigative Committee declined to open an investigation.
“We are appealing that refusal,” she said.
In March, a local court rejected Inozemtseva’s appeal against her expulsion from the university.
“Now we are preparing another appeal,” Inozemtseva, who was working on a master’s degree in political science before being kicked out, told RFE/RL. “I am ready to go to the Supreme Court and to the European Court of Human Rights.”
“But I want to win my case against the university here in Russia and not at the European court,” she added. “And I want to see the people who abducted me on January 23 punished.”
“I don’t want to quit,” she concluded, falling into thought. “Quit what? You can’t even call it activism. I just do what I do. But if I stop doing that, I will become just another indifferent person. And although Russia does not love me, I cannot be indifferent to it.”
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting from Vologda by RFE/RL Russian Service North.Realities correspondent Kirill Kruglikov.. RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Darya Yegorova contributed from Astrakhan.
ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Kenzhebek Abishev, who was jailed for being linked to a political movement founded by a fugitive tycoon, has launched a hunger strike after his early release on parole was cancelled at the last moment.
Kazakhstan’s International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law said on April 12 that Abishev started the hunger strike the previous day. It published a letter from the activist addressed to President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, urging him to intervene on his behalf.
In his letter, Abishev calls the cancellation of the court’s decision to release him on parole in February and the case against him “illegal,” adding that his medical conditions — heart and respiratory problems — had worsened due to the lack of proper medical treatment in prison.
“There is no sense for me to continue living, consuming food, and treat my illnesses. Do you want to kill me? Then kill me. I am tired of life,” Abishev said in his letter to the president.
There have been no official statements regarding Abishev’s hunger strike either by the Penitentiary Service or the Prosecutor-General’s Office.
On February 1, a court in the southern city of Qapshaghai ruled that Abishev could be released on February 16, more than three years early, for good behavior while in prison, a procedure allowed by Kazakh law.
However, the Almaty regional prosecutor’s office appealed the ruling at the very last moment, arguing that the 53-year-old activist’s good behavior in custody was not enough for his release since he still had more than three years to serve.
The court then scrapped the move, leaving Abishev in prison.
Abishev was sentenced to seven years in prison in December 2018 after he and two other activists were found guilty of planning a “holy war” because they were spreading the ideas of the banned Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) movement. His prison term was later cut by eight months.
Abishev, whom Kazakh rights groups have recognized as a political prisoner, pleaded not guilty, calling the case against him politically motivated.
The DVK was founded by Mukhtar Ablyazov, an outspoken critic of the government who has been living in France for several years.
Ablyazov has organized unsanctioned anti-government rallies in Kazakhstan via the Internet in recent years.
Jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny says he has filed a lawsuit against the administration of Correctional Colony No. 2, where he is incarcerated, for not allowing him to read the Koran.
Navalny wrote on Instagram on April 13 that the holy book for Muslims, the Koran, and all of the other books he brought with him to the penitentiary in early March had been withheld, as the guards said that they needed three months to check all his books — including the Koran — for extremism.
“The problem is that they have not given me my Koran. When they incarcerated me, I made a list of tasks to improve myself while in prison. One of such points was to study deeply and understand the Koran and the Prophet’s followers…. I understood that my development as a Christian also requires the study of the Koran,” Navalny wrote.
Navalny’s statement comes on the first day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, during which practicing Muslims abstain from eating, drinking, smoking, and sex from dawn to sunset.
Some 10 percent of Russia’s population of more than 144 million are Muslims or from an Islamic cultural background.
Navalny was arrested in January on his arrival from Germany, where he was treated for a poisoning in Siberia with what was defined by European labs as a nerve agent in August 2020. Navalny accused President Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning, which 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 to be politically motivated.
His 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from the case was converted into a prison term, though the court said he will serve just over 2 1/2 years in prison given time he had been held in detention.
Navalny has complained recently of back pain and numbness in his hands and legs and has accused the authorities of withholding adequate medical treatment.
The 44-year-old politician 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.
DUSHANBE — A man suspected of theft has died after officials say he “jumped” out of a police building in Tajikistan.
The Interior Ministry said on April 10 that the incident took place in the city of Vahdat, about 19 kilometers from the capital, Dushanbe.
According to the ministry, 31-year-old Mehriddin Gadozoda “jumped out of the window on the third floor with the intention of avoiding criminal charges” and died hours later in the hospital.
The ministry said that Gadozoda was detained and had been brought to police after investigators found him in possession items that had been reported stolen in 12 robbery cases.
Vahdat
Gadozoda’s relatives have yet to comment, and it was not immediately possible to verify the police account through independent sources. The case is one of several in Tajikistan where suspects have died while in police custody. In most of the cases, the relatives of the deceased have alleged foul play, saying their loved ones were beaten or tortured to death.
Domestic and international human rights groups have criticized Tajik authorities for beating and torturing suspects and prison inmates for years.
Tajik authorities have acknowledged that brutality involving police or prison guards occurs, but insist that such cases are not common.
In March 2018, authorities in the southern city of Kulob said a suspect, Abdurasul Nazarov, died of a heart attack while in police custody, while his relatives said his body showed signs of beating and torture.
In 2015, Shamsiddin Zaidulloev, detained on suspicion of illegal drugs-related crime in Dushanbe, died while in custody. Officials said at the time that the death was caused by a heart attack. That explanation was rejected by the man’s relatives, who insisted that Zaidulloev died after he was severely beaten by police.
Also in 2015, police in Vahdat said that Umar Bobojonov had died in police custody after he fell inside a concrete well while drunk. Bobojonov’s relatives said at the time that he had been beaten to death by police after he was detained for wearing a beard amid a government crackdown on radical Muslims.
In 2011, the Interior Ministry said that another theft suspect, Bahromiddin Shodiev, died in the hospital after he jumped out of a window on the second floor of a police station in Dushanbe. The man’s relatives have insisted that he was severely beaten and tortured by police.
In March 2011, 37-year-old Dushanbe resident Safarali Sangov died several days after he was beaten and taken from his house by plainclothes officers. Police said then that Sangov, suspected of drugs possession, tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a first-floor window during his interrogation, while the man’s relatives said he was tortured by police.
Amnesty International has called on Iran to halt the execution of a man sentenced to death for the rape of a minor.
The London-based rights watchdog said Farhad Salehi Jabehdar, 30, is scheduled to be executed on April 13 in the northern province of Alborz.
His execution has been scheduled even though a request for a judicial review of his case is pending before the Supreme Court.
Iran’s Supreme Court on April 11 informed Jabehdar’s lawyer that the judicial review request will be examined in several weeks but rejected the lawyer’s request to order a stay.
In a statement on April 11, Amnesty said that “in addition to the fact that the use of the death penalty for the crime of rape is prohibited under international law, the death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment and is never the answer.”
Jabehdar was arrested in June 2018 in connection with the sexual assault of a 10-year-old child in 2017.
He was convicted of “forced male-male intercourse” and sentenced to death in 2019. The conviction and sentence were upheld by Supreme Court.
The parents of the child have formally requested that the authorities not impose the death penalty on Jabehdar.
Iran is the world’s second-most-active executioner after China, according to Amnesty.
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.
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.
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.
MINSK — Well-known human rights activist Tatsyana Hatsura-Yavorskaya, one of the founders of the Belarusian civil rights group Zvyano (Chain), is being held in a detention center on an unspecified charge.
Hatsura-Yavorskaya was detained on April 6 after police searched her home and office, saying that the searches were conducted as part of an investigation into “financing mass disorders.”
Crisis In Belarus
Read our coverage as Belarusians continue to demand the resignation of Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid a brutal crackdown on protesters. The West refuses to recognize him as the country’s legitimate leader after an August 9 election considered fraudulent.
The activist’s husband, Uladzimer Yavorski, told RFE/RL late on April 8 that a court in Minsk earlier in the day had fined his wife for “disobedience to police,” but that they did not immediately release her afterward.
“[After the hearing] we waited for her near the detention center. But in the end, her lawyer told us that Tatsyana will remain in custody as she had a different status. She had been detained on a criminal charge. We do not know what exactly the charge is at this point,” Yavorski said.
A day before Hatsura-Yavorskaya’s detainment, two of her associates, Natallya Trenina and Yulia Syamenchanka, were also detained after their homes were searched.
Trenina and Syamenchanka helped Hatsura-Yavorskaya organize an exhibition in Minsk devoted to physicians assisting COVID-19 patients called The Gadget Is Breathing, But I Am Not.
Hatsura-Yavorskaya, a mother of four, is known for initiating several cultural events, including WATCH DOCS, an international festival of documentaries about human rights that has been held each year since 2015.
She and her associates were arrested amid an ongoing crackdown directed by authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka to quell demonstrations sparked by the official results of a presidential election last August that handed Lukashenka a sixth term in office.
Opposition figures say the election was rigged. Many countries and groups, including the United States and the European Union, have refused to recognize Lukashenka as the leader of Belarus. They have also imposed sanctions on him and several senior Belarusian officials over the crackdown.
Prosecutors in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, have launched a criminal investigation into possible official negligence in the case of a suspected murder-suicide that has mobilized public anger over the ongoing practice of “bride kidnapping.”
The bodies of 27-year-old Aizada Kanatbekova and the man who is thought to have abducted her along with accomplices in broad daylight in the capital were found in the getaway car on April 7, two days after the kidnapping.
An investigation oversight agency said on its website late on April 8 that the negligence investigation was handed over to the local office of the Kyrgyz State Committee for National Security (UKMK).
The tragedy sparked protests in several cities and calls for dismissals, including that of Interior Minister Ulan Niyazbekov.
Investigators believe 36-year-old Zamirbek Tengizbaev strangled Kanatbekova with a shirt and then committed suicide by cutting a vein.
They also have said that Tengizbaev had three previous criminal convictions in Russia.
Four people have been detained on suspicion of helping abduct Kanatbekova on the street on April 5, an event that was caught by surveillance cameras that also showed passersby failing to help stop the kidnapping.
Kanatbekova was an only daughter and a graduate of the Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University in Bishkek.
Kyrgyzstan sees thousands of bride kidnappings each year despite criminalization of the practice in 2013.
The UN Development Program and rights groups have highlighted the ongoing prevalence in Kyrgyz society of the practice, which they say often leads to marital rape, domestic violence, and other ills.
One of the most notorious cases involved the stabbing death in 2018 of 20-year-old university student Burulai Turdaaly Kyzy by a man who was trying to force her into marriage.
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
ALMATY, Kazakhstan — The Almaty-based human rights group Dignity, Spirit, Truth says a well-known Kazakh political prisoner Aset Abishev, who is serving a four-year prison term for his links with a banned political group, was placed in solitary confinement after he slit his wrists in protest at his treatment by guards.
A leading member of the rights group, Bakhytzhan Toreghozhina, told RFE/RL on April 8 that inmates in the LA-155/14 correctional colony near Almaty had informed her the previous day that Abishev’s condition is very serious.
According to Toreghozhina, Abishev, who has been placed in the colony’s medical unit for an unspecified illness, cut his wrists on April 7 protesting poor medical assistance and lack of medicine.
“What triggered Aset’s move to maim himself was the rude response to his demands by guards who intimidated him, searching his personal belongings on that day. After he cut his wrists, instead of providing him with necessary medical assistance, they locked him in solitary confinement. His life is in danger,” Toreghozhina said, adding that her group had called on Kazakhstan’s Interior Ministry, the Prosecutor-General’s Office, and the Penitentiary Service to immediately intervene in the situation.
Abishev’s relatives told RFE/RL that in recent days he was severely beaten by Interior Ministry troops after his belongings were searched during prison-riot drills.
An officer on duty at the LA-155/14 penitentiary, who introduced herself as Alia Kakenova, told RFE/RL that she was not aware of the situation, adding that “all bosses are out of the office.”
Abishev was sentenced to four years in prison in November 2018 after a court in Almaty found him guilty of participating in the activities of the banned opposition Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) movement and financially supporting it.
Abishev has rejected the charges, denying the DVK movement or its founder — fugitive former banker and a vocal critic of Kazakhstan’s government, Mukhtar Ablyazov — were extremist.
In recent years, many activists across the Central Asian nation have been convicted for their involvement in the activities of DVK and its associate, the Street Party.
Inmates in Kazakh prisons very often maim themselves to protest conditions in penitentiary facilities or violations of their rights.
MINSK — The criminal case of Belarusian opposition member Paval Sevyarynets, who has been in custody in Minsk since June on a charge of taking part in mass protests in the country’s capital, has been moved to a court in the eastern city of Mahilyou.
The politician’s wife, Volha Sevyarynets, told RFE/RL on April 7 that her husband is expected to be transferred from a detention center in Minsk to Mahilyou for the trial. The date of the trial remains unknown.
No reason for the move was given but many believe that the authorities took this decision to try to lower the profile of the proceedings by making it harder for journalists and the international community to follow. Mahilyou is almost 200 kilometers (120 miles) east of Minsk.
Sevyarynets, a co-chairman of the non-registered opposition Belarusian Christian Democratic Party, is one of dozens of activists and politicians who were detained in Minsk and several other cities across Belarus during rallies in June last year. At these events, hundreds of demonstrators were collecting signatures necessary to register candidates other than the authoritarian incumbent, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, for an August 9 presidential election.
Sevyarynets’ detention has been prolonged several times since his initial arrest.
If convicted, he faces up to eight years in prison.
Relatives and colleagues of several other jailed opposition activists — including Yauhen Afnahel, Andrey Voynich, Paval Yukhnevich, Maksim Vinyarski, Iryna Shchasnaya, and Dzmitry Kazlou — said earlier that they will be tried along with Sevyarynets in Mahilyou.
Lukashenka, who has ruled the country since 1994, was declared the winner in the election, which was widely viewed as rigged in his favor.
Thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest the results, saying Lukashenka’s challenger, Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, actually won the vote.
Tsikhanouskaya left Belarus for Lithuania after the election for security reasons, while Lukashenka has directed a brutal postelection crackdown in which almost 30,000 people have been detained, hundreds beaten, several killed, and journalists targeted.
Lukashenka, who has run Belarus since 1994, and other top officials have been slapped with sanctions by the West, which refuses to recognize him as the legitimate leader of the country.
TALGHAR, Kazakhstan — A court in southern Kazakhstan has handed a parole-like sentence to an activist for his links with the banned Koshe (Street) Party, one of several supporters of the opposition movement to be sentenced in recent months.
The Talghar district court in the southern Almaty region sentenced 36-year-old Erkin Sabanshiev on April 7 to one year of “freedom limitation” after finding him guilty of participating in the activities of the opposition Koshe Party, which has links with another outlawed party, the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) movement.
Sabanshiev was banned from using the media or the Internet to conduct political and social activities for three years.
Sabanshiev, who was arrested and charged six months ago, told RFE/RL after his sentence was pronounced that he will appeal the ruling.
Several of Sabanshiev’s supporters were not allowed to attend the hearing on April 7. One of them, Aidyn Nusipaliev, was detained by police and later in the day sentenced to 15 days in jail for “organizing an unsanctioned rally.”
Several activists across the Central Asian nation have been handed “freedom limitation” sentences in recent months for their involvement in the activities of the Koshe Party and DVK, as well as for taking part in rallies organized by the two groups.
DVK is led by Mukhtar Ablyazov, the fugitive former head of Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank and an outspoken critic of the Kazakh government. Kazakh authorities labeled DVK extremist and banned the group in March 2018.
Human rights groups have said Kazakhstan’s law on public gatherings contradicts international standards as it requires preliminary permission from authorities to hold rallies and envisions prosecution for organizing and participating in unsanctioned rallies even though the nation’s constitution guarantees its citizens the right of free assembly.
ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia — The father of Ivan Zhdanov, the director of jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), has been remanded in custody on a charge of abuse of office, which he and his supporters reject.
The Rostov regional court on April 7 upheld an earlier decision by a lower court in the city of Rostov-on-Don to keep 66-year-old Yury Zhdanov in pretrial detention at least until May 21.
Yury Zhdanov, who took part in the hearing via a video link from the detention center, and his lawyers requested the court transfer him to house arrest due to his age and the danger of getting infected with the coronavirus while in custody.
Zhdanov said at the hearing that many of those in his cell are sick. He said earlier that the cell he is kept in is so overcrowded that inmates have to sleep in shifts due to the limited number of beds.
Yury Zhdanov was sent to pretrial detention after police searched his home on March 26.
His son said last week that he had “no doubts that the criminal case was launched because of me and my activities.” He called his father’s arrest “absolutely a new level of villainy and turpitude from the [Russian] presidential administration.”
According to Zhdanov, before retiring last summer his father worked as an official in a remote town for several years.
Investigators now accuse Yury Zhdanov of recommending the town’s administration provide a local woman with a subsidized apartment, though it later turned out that the woman’s family had previously received housing allocations.
The apartment was later returned to municipal ownership in accordance with a court decision and no one among those who made the decision was held responsible.
Navalny’s FBK is known for publishing investigative reports about corruption among Russia’s top officials, including President Vladimir Putin.
The latest report focused on a lavish Black Sea mansion that Navalny’s team called “a palace for Putin,” capturing worldwide attention with almost 116 million views on YouTube.
The report showcases a luxurious, 100 billion ruble ($1.32 billion) estate near the popular holiday town of Gelendzhik that it said Putin effectively owns via a complex trail of companies.
The Kremlin has denied the report, saying “one or several [businessmen] directly or indirectly own” the property, adding that it “has no right to reveal the names of these owners.”
A Russian court has ordered a fine against the popular video-sharing application TikTok in the country’s latest major dispute with a global social platform over content allegedly related to political protests.
The Moscow court ruled on April 6 that TikTok failed to delete content that it said was related to unsanctioned demonstrations, according to local reports.
Russian critics of the Kremlin routinely use international social networks, including Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube, to get around state control of the media and reach tens of millions of citizens with their anti-government messages.
Some local reports suggested the TikTok fine — 2.6 million roubles ($34,000) — pertained to alleged appeals to minors urging them to join political demonstrations.
Russian authorities this week backed off slightly from a threat to ban the Twitter social network but have punitively slowed its user connections and announced suits targeting fellow Western digital giants Google and Facebook.
TikTok is owned by China’s ByteDance and reports nearly 700 million active users worldwide.
India and Pakistan have banned TikTok in the past, citing politically contentious posts, and then-President Donald Trump sought unsuccessfully last year to ban it in the United States.
Russia’s state communications regulator said on April 5 that it wouldn’t ban Twitter amid a dispute over content related to protests but would continue to slow the U.S. social network’s speed inside the country until the middle of May.
Imprisoned Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny in January used U.S. social-media networks to organize some of the largest anti-government protests since 2011-12.
A Russian court on April 2 levied a nearly $120,000 fine against Twitter for failing to removes posts related to those protests.
The Russian regulator has also focused its complaints against Twitter over alleged failures to remove child pornography and content the overseers said encourages drug use and suicide among children.
Twitter said it has a zero-tolerance policy regarding child pornography and other content deemed harmful.
Roskomnadzor began slowing the speed of traffic on Twitter last month.
In its April 5 statement, the regulator said it would not ban Twitter yet after it claimed the platform took down 1,900 of 3,100 posts with banned content.
Russia’s efforts to tighten control of the Internet and social media date back to 2012, shortly after the largest anti-government protests in years.
Since then, a growing number of restrictions targeting messaging apps, websites, and social-media platforms have been introduced in Russia.
Russia’s Alliance of Doctors trade union has called for jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny to receive “qualified treatment” after he was moved to a sick ward after complaining of a cough and temperature.
Navalny said in an Instagram post on April 5 that doctors had officially diagnosed him with a “severe cough” and a temperature of 38.1 degrees Celsius, which indicates a slight fever, after a third prisoner in his quarters had been sent to the hospital with suspected tuberculosis.
Sergei Ryabkov, the deputy head of the medical trade union, told Current Time late on April 5 that while the prison infirmary has “professional doctors,” they work in conditions where they are not provided with enough equipment to manage a patient.”
“The medical infirmary at the penitentiary is an isolation ward. They isolated [Navalny] because he showed symptoms of an infectious disease. That is good, but what he needs is not just isolation but qualified treatment,” Ryabkov said, adding that the union will hold a “humanitarian action” near the prison to support Navalny. Current Time is the Russian-language TV network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic is currently incarcerated in Correctional Colony No. 2, about 100 kilometers from Moscow, which is known as one of the toughest penitentiaries in Russia.
Navalny said his prison unit consists of 15 people, three of whom have been hospitalized with suspected tuberculosis since he arrived.
Tuberculosis is a potentially serious infectious disease that mainly affects the lungs and is spread from person to person through tiny droplets released into the air, mainly via coughs and sneezes.
It has largely been eradicated in developed countries and a person with a healthy immune system often successfully fights it.
In his April 5 post, Navalny said his prison unit has been fed clay-like porridge and frozen potatoes. He is currently on a hunger strike to demand better conditions. Malnutrition and weight loss undermine an immune system’s ability to fight tuberculosis.
“I have a legally guaranteed right to invite a specialist doctor at my own expense. I will not give up this right as prison doctors can be trusted just as much as state TV,” the 44-year-old said in the Instagram post.
Navalny had previously complained of acute back and leg pain as well as sleep deprivation by guards.
Navalny criticized recent news reports by state-owned media that he is serving in a prison with comfortable conditions. He invited state media correspondents to come stay the night in his prison with tuberculosis-infected cellmates.
Russian police arrested Navalny in January upon his return from Germany on charges of violating his parole while abroad, sparking large-scale protests. The anti-corruption fighter had been recuperating in Berlin for several months after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in Siberia.
Navalny has accused agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service of attempting to assassinate him with the poison.
A Moscow court in February found him guilty of violating the terms of his parole from an older embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His suspended 3 1/2-year sentence was converted into jail time, though the court reduced that amount to 2 1/2 years for time already served in detention.
Navalny’s imprisonment has caused a chorus of international criticism, with the United States and its allies demanding his unconditional release and vowing to continue to hold those responsible for his poisoning to account.
A Russian court has fined Twitter nearly $117,000 for failing to delete what officials describe as banned content amid growing Kremlin pressure on U.S. social-media companies.
The April 2 decision against Twitter is the first in a series of rulings expected in the coming days against U.S. social-media companies in Russia. Cases are currently ongoing against Facebook and YouTube.
The cases all pertain to content published on their platforms in January that called on Russians to protest the arrest of Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny.
Russia’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor described the postings as “inciting teenagers” to take part in “illegal activities” or “unauthorized mass events.”
Navalny was detained by Russian police in mid-January upon his return from Germany on charges of violating his parole.
Navalny had been recuperating in Berlin after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent during a trip to Siberia in August to investigate local corruption. Navalny has accused officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, of trying to assassinate him with the nerve agent.
Tens of thousands of Russians around the country heeded the calls to protest on January 23 and January 31, making them among the largest anti-government demonstrations in years.
Russia later sentenced Navalny to jail for more than two years in a case he says is aimed at punishing him for surviving the poisoning.
The fines against U.S. social-media companies are part of a larger Kremlin strategy to weaken their influence in Russia, analysts say.
The strategy also includes slowing traffic speed and developing domestic equivalents to YouTube.
The Kremlin controls major media assets, including television, but social-media platforms, which are growing as a source of information for Russians, remain outside its control.
Navalny and his supporters have deftly used YouTube and Twitter to spread his anti-government message to millions of citizens.
Russia last month slowed the speed of Twitter and threatened to ban the social-media service outright.
Twitter at the time said it was “deeply concerned by increased attempts to block and throttle online public conversation.”
Leading human rights groups in Russia have condemned the country’s role in abuses in Syria, including its participation in the bombing of civilian targets.
The condemnation comes in a 198-page report, billed as the first report on the deadly conflict by Russian rights groups, including the prominent Memorial human rights center and several other organizations.
The report includes more than 150 interviews with witnesses and survivors based in Russia, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Germany, Belgium, and other countries.
“Focusing on the plight of these civilians, we conclude that much greater responsibility for Syria’s future lies with all state parties to the conflict, Russia foremost among them,” the report says.
“The overwhelming majority of our interviewees do not see Russia as a savior, but as a destructive foreign force whose military and political intervention helped bolster the war criminal heading their country,” the report added.
“Some of the people we interviewed revealed that they or their loved ones had been victims of Russian bombings,” it said.
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The report accuses Russia of abuses in Syria, including bombing civilians indiscriminately and backing Syria’s regime, which has been accused of widespread atrocities including the use of chemical weapons.
The report calls on Moscow to conduct independent investigations into the Russian Army’s bombardments in Syria and pay compensation to victims.
The authors of the report said it was compiled mainly to present information about human rights abuses in Syria to Russian readers, where “we have the sense that Russian society is not adequately informed about this conflict in which our country has played a key role.”
Russia, along with Iran, has played a critical role in helping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad remain in power despite a 10-year conflict that has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions.
The European Union has accused Moscow of launching a “conscription campaign” in the Russia-controlled Ukrainian region of Crimea, in a move that the bloc said violated international law.
The EU’s strongly worded statement came as Ukraine accused Russia of massing troops near their shared border, an accusation rejected by the Kremlin.
“Today, the Russian Federation has launched yet another conscription campaign in the illegally-annexed Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to draft residents of the peninsula in the Russian Federation Armed Forces,” the EU said in a statement on April 1.
Observers noted that Russia has in the past conducted military call-ups in the springtime.
The bloc said the Russian military conscription drive in Crimea was “another violation of international humanitarian law.”
It stressed that “the Russian Federation is bound by international law, and obliged to ensure the protection of human rights on the peninsula” and reiterated “the EU does not and will not recognize the illegal annexation” of Crimea.
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by the international community after Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted amid a wave of public protests.
Moscow also backs separatists in a war against Ukrainian government forces that has killed more than 13,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.
The EU has imposed several rounds of sanctions on individuals and entities accused of undermining Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.
MOSCOW — Milana Magomedova is a 22-year-old woman who, until recently, lived with her parents and younger brother and sister in the Siberian oil city of Tyumen.
Since December, Magomedova has been trying to escape her parents, natives of the North Caucasus region of Daghestan who ran their family life according to a strict interpretation of their region’s traditional Islamic values.
Magomedova was not allowed to have a job or to leave the house without permission. Her parents were avidly attempting to arrange a marriage for her. Last year, she decided to leave the dental institute where her parents had sent her to study, she told RFE/RL. She knew there would be a scandal when she got home, and she was right. Her father struck her, she recalled, and threatened to send her back to his native village in Daghestan to live with relatives, who, he assured her, would see to it that she got no education at all.
“I just wanted to get a job as a cashier or something, but they wouldn’t let me,” she said. “Because of the whole situation, I had no friends except for one girlfriend. Who would want to be friends with someone who can’t leave the house? I started to understand that there was no point in sitting there any longer. I had to run away.”
The Russian authorities have long turned a blind eye to the human rights issues presented by many of the customs of the North Caucasus.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, adjacent to Daghestan, has been frequently accused by domestic and international rights groups of overseeing massive human rights abuses including abductions, torture, extrajudicial killings, the persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and political and personal assassinations. Kadyrov himself routinely berates and humiliates critics in the media, compelling them from fear to apologize.
‘Tip Of The Iceberg’
According to a 2018 report by the Dutch NGO Stichting Justice Initiative, there were at least 33 cases of so-called honor killings in the Russian North Caucasus between 2008 and 2017. Of the 39 victims, 36 were female.
“Most of the victims were daughters, sisters, wives, cousins or stepdaughters of their killers,” the report said. Only 14 of the incidents led to criminal prosecutions, producing 13 convictions and prison sentences ranging between six and 15 years.
“But this is just the tip of the iceberg,” the report added. “In reality, only a small portion of such crimes ever become known and are taken up by law enforcement and the media.” Most cases are dismissed by local authorities as “accidents.”
Toward the end of last year, Magomedova became acquainted via the Internet with Vladislav Khorev, a 32-year-old man from Ufa in the Bashkortostan region. After hearing of her plight, Khorev decided to help her escape, and he flew to Tyumen at the end of December. Shortly after New Year’s, Magomedova gathered a few belongings and the pair flew off, first to Moscow and then on to Turkey, which was one of the few countries open to Russians because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vladislav Khorev and Milana Magomedova in Istanbul.
After a few days in Istanbul, the pair traveled to St. Petersburg, where Khorev helped Magomedova rent an apartment. She was almost immediately contacted by the police, who informed her that her parents had filed a missing person report about her in Tyumen. As Magomedova later found out, a police source in Tyumen gave her address to her parents and, on January 18, her mother, Gyulliser Magomedova, appeared at her door. Later that night, her father, Musa Magomedov, showed up, and the couple tried to take her away by force. RFE/RL has heard an audio recording of the encounter, during which Magomedov struck his daughter.
During the conflict, Magomedova was able to contact Khorev, who called the police. When they arrived, they supposedly found nothing out of order. Khorev watched from the street as Magomedova was put into a waiting car (he photographed the car and shared the photo with RFE/RL). He followed them to another address and again called the police. When they arrived, they took everyone, including Khorev, to a police station.
“At the police station, they first listened to my father because he refused to leave me alone,” Magomedova said. “Then they spoke to me. I told them my side of the story and they said, ‘OK, so you are so independent, but you don’t understand that [Khorev] is a human trafficker.’”
Passport Seized
She said that they asked in detail about her relationship with Khorev. She told them that she had looked through his phone and his computer, that she had taken photocopies of his identification documents. She assured them that she did not owe Khorev any money.
“Finally, I added that even if he is a human trafficker, I didn’t want to go back with my parents,” she said. “I asked them to accept my complaint that they were trying to take me away by force. And one of them said to me, ‘Milana, don’t you understand that is your custom?’”
Vladislav Khorev,
Khorev told RFE/RL that he was questioned by an officer of the Interior Ministry’s Center E, which combats extremism and terrorism. Khorev had been holding Magomedova’s passport at her request, he said, to prevent her parents from taking it.
The police, however, found this suspicious and ordered him to give it to them.
In the end, the St. Petersburg police gave turned Magomedova and her documents over to her parents and allowed them to take her back to Tyumen.
“When I arrived home, I thought we would have some sort of conversation, that they would ask me what had happened,” Magomedova recalled. “But they started immediately threatening me, saying that if I ran away again, they would send me to Daghestan and there I would have no education or anything else. They said I had shamed them and had deprived myself…of any future.”
“My aunt, my father’s sister, told me that if they take me to Daghestan, I could easily be killed,” Magomedova said. “That no one there would remember anything about me, that everything would be dismissed as an accident, that no one would look into anything. She said that there are special cemeteries there for my type. I thought I knew my parents, but I never imagined that they would threaten to kill me or have me committed to a mental hospital.”
In order to calm her parents, Magomedova acted contrite, promised that she wouldn’t run away again, and began seeing a therapist to “calm her nerves.” But on February 10, she ran away a second time, in her pajamas and without her telephone or any money. Khorev was able to help her travel to Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, where she contacted human rights lawyer Fyodor Akchermyshev. He applied to the regional office of the Interior Ministry and was able to have Magomedova removed from the missing person’s list.
Her parents, however, did not give up. They filed complaint after complaint with the police in Tyumen. Somehow, her file from Yekaterinburg ended up with the police in Tyumen, who passed the information on to Magomedova’s parents. They began calling Akchermyshev and urging him to stop helping their daughter, saying that she was mentally ill. They also began calling Khorev.
Magomedova said she has a distant relative named Shamil Radzhabov who works for the Interior Ministry in Tyumen. Some of her acquaintances told her that they had been questioned by Radzhabov about her disappearance. She suspects he could be leaking her personal information to her parents.
She told RFE/RL that when she and Akchermyshev went to the police in Yekaterinburg to file a second complaint, they were told that her mother had visited the address that Magomedova had written on the first complaint and found no one there. Magomedova had written an incorrect address because she did not want to reveal her whereabouts.
‘Physical Force’
Magomedova’s parents filed a complaint saying that Khorev had kidnapped their daughter. But when police searched his apartment and questioned him, they found nothing incriminating. Her parents then filed a similar complaint about Akchermyshev.
In an interview with RFE/RL, Magomedova’s mother repeated her unsubstantiated allegations, saying that her daughter had been kidnapped, first by Khorev and then by Akchermyshev, in order to be sold as a prostitute to the militant group Islamic State, which is classified in Russia as a terrorist organization.
On March 23, Magomedova and Akchermyshev arrived at the office of the migration service to pick up her replacement passport. Although everyone else in line simply waited and then was handed the prepared document, Magomedova was told that she would have to wait longer because a stamp was missing.
“We understood that they were calling the police,” she said. When the police arrived, the two were taken to a a precinct house and questioned again about the accusation that Akchermyshev had kidnapped her.
During the questioning, a man Magomedova did not know entered the room. The officers did nothing while the man ushered Akchermyshev out and continued questioning Magomedova. Meanwhile, Akchermyshev was able to telephone journalists, telling them that the unknown man had used “physical force” against him in front of police officers.
Fyodor Akchermyshev says he has identified the man who accosted him at the police station as a senior officer of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Interior Ministry named Magomedimin Kurbanov (left).
Local journalists arrived at the station and found cars parked outside with license plates from Daghestan and Tyumen. Police informed Magomedova that her mother wanted to talk to her, but she refused.
After the journalists began photographing the cars and the people in them, they drove away. Magomedova and Akchermyshev were released after spending five hours at the police station.
Two days later, Akchermyshev said that he was able to identify the man who accosted him at the police station as a senior officer of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Interior Ministry named Magomedimin Kurbanov. He told RFE/RL that he has filed a complaint against Kurbanov with the Sverdlovsk police and the Investigative Committee.
“I never did get my passport,” Magomedova told RFE/RL. “I don’t know what will happen next. I think I’ll just lay low – it is terrifying just to go outside.”
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting from Moscow by RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Sergei Khazov-Cassia
