Don’t Say Purge: One More Russian General Arrested on Corruption Charges The Kremlin seems to think that more than a few of its top officers are responsible for filching millions of rubles’ worth of cash and military resources from the Russian war effort. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/41623
Russia seeks six years for medic for criticising Ukraine campaign https://nordot.app/1227636301362610509 Moscow (AFP) - Russian prosecutors on Friday demanded a six-year prison sentence for a paediatrician accused of criticising the Ukraine campaign during a private appointment, in a case that has revealed the extent of repression gripping Russia. Nadezhda Buyanova was reported to the police by the ex-wife of a soldier missing after fighting in Ukraine -- Anastasia Akinshina -- who accused her of calling the man a "legal target of Ukraine." The 68-year-old was arrested in February and has been in pre-trial detention since April. The case against Buyanova is built without public evidence the conversation ever took place and after Akinshina's seven-year-old son testified against her, in a practise reminiscent of Soviet-era denouncements and trials. Handcuffed behind a glass defendant's cage in a court hearing on Friday, the Moscow medic cried and said: "I am innocent." Buyanova's case has been singled out in Russia -- which has seen hundreds of trials against people accused of criticising the Ukraine campaign -- as particularly harsh. Many have pointed to her birthplace -- Ukraine's western city of Lviv, which Russia has painted as the root of all evil -- as a reason for such treatment. Buyanova, who has lived in Russia for more than three decades, has been accused of "personal" hatred towards Russia -- something she denied in court. "I was born in the city of Lviv, a city in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic," she said, sobbing after prosecutors announced they were seeking a years-long prison sentence. "What kind of hatred can I feel? I am related to three Slavic peoples: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine," she said. "I am not a politician... I am just a doctor," she said. \- 'None of this happened' - Buyanova is charged with spreading "fake" information on the Russian army, under military censorship laws used to silence dissent. Buyanova's defence said there is no audio recording of the conversation, that Akinshina's child was interrogated by the FSB security service and that his testimony used wording unlikely to have been used naturally by a child of his age. Buyanova has denied the charges. "None of this happened," Buyanova said in court Friday, saying that Akinshina had made up the conversation. Akinshina had at the start of the trial said her son was not present in the room when the dialogue took place. But in a court hearing over the summer, the boy said that Buyanova had alleged, "Russia is an aggressor country and Russia kills peaceful people in Ukraine." He also said that Buyanova had called his father a "legal target for Ukraine." "I saw that boy... These were such adult phrases, such scary ones. I doubt that those were his words," Buyanova said in court. Lawyers had asked if the boy was pressured, but the court refused to consider the complaint. "It is obvious the boy could not remember or understand such phrases like 'legal target'," Buyanova's lawyer Oskar Cherdiyev told reporters. "There are no witnesses of the conversation," he added. \- 'Life did not spoil me' - He also decried the treatment of his client. A photograph of Buyanova standing in her trashed Moscow apartment after it was raided by security services, was shared widely on the Russia internet in February. And at a hearing last month Buyanova said she suffered a head injury after a van bringing her to court had braked suddenly. "Life did not spoil me. I did not have an easy life. I am from a simple family," she said, her voice breaking, prior to the hearing. A dozen people, mostly medics, came to support Buyanova -- whose first name, Nadezhda, means "hope" in Russian -- in court. "The whole situation is absurd," said a 49-year-old child psychologist, Arina, told AFP. "The only thing we can do is to show Nadezhda that she is not alone... That there are people who are hoping for a miracle," she said.
Putin is not going to put up with any comedy. In Russia humor is not allowed, comrade. Russia Designates Stand-Up Comedian Denis Chuzhoi ‘Foreign Agent’ https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024...p-comedian-denis-chuzhoi-foreign-agent-a86956
Putin does not like chefs who open their mouths either. Russian Celebrity Chef Who Lost TV Show for Criticizing Putin Found Dead in Hotel Room https://www.latintimes.com/russian-...riticizing-putin-found-dead-hotel-room-565737
Moscow mother of two gets eight years in prison for anti-Putin comments https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/3231159/moscow-mother-jailed-anti-putin-comments/
The Soviet era is back -- complete with denunciations and informers being pervasive in Russian society. Don't like your neighbor? Just claim they said some anti-war stuff and get them locked up. In echo of Soviet era, Russians are informing on each other over Ukraine https://www.reuters.com/world/europ...ther-over-ukraine-echo-soviet-era-2024-11-15/ On the last day of January, a woman took her son to see paediatrician Nadezhda Buyanova at Polyclinic No. 140 in northwest Moscow. The boy, aged seven, had a problem with one of his eyes. The conversation that the boy’s mother alleged took place during an 18-minute encounter at the clinic would change both women’s lives and land the 68-year-old doctor in prison. The case hinged on a denunciation - part of a rising trend of Russians informing on fellow citizens for their views on the war in Ukraine and other alleged political crimes. Critics say the wave of denunciations is helping President Vladimir Putin’s government crack down on dissent. In a video recorded as she was walking away from the clinic, the mother, Anastasia Akinshina, said she had told the doctor the boy was traumatised because his father was killed fighting for Russia in the war in Ukraine. “Do you know what she told me? ‘Well, my dear, what do you expect? Your husband was a legitimate target of Ukraine,’” Akinshina said, mimicking the doctor’s voice and intonation. Fighting back tears, Akinshina said she had raised the incident with the hospital administration and suspected they planned to hush it up. “So the question is: where can I complain about this bitch now, so that she’ll be kicked out of the fucking country or sent to the devil in jail?” she said in the video, which went viral on social media and thrust her into a high-profile criminal trial as the key prosecution witness. At the trial, Buyanova denied making the comment. But despite a lack of further adult witnesses, the denunciation was sufficient to destroy her 40-year medical career and her life. The doctor, who had been in pre-trial detention since April, appeared before a Moscow court on Tuesday, her grey hair closely cropped. She was found guilty under a wartime censorship law of “publicly spreading deliberately false information” about the armed forces and sentenced to five-and-a-half years in a penal colony. Buyanova was born in Ukraine but is a citizen of Russia, where she has lived and worked for three decades. Her lawyer Oscar Cherdzhiyev told Reuters the defence believed Akinshina acted out of malice because of the doctor’s Ukrainian origins. Akinshina did not respond to written questions for this story, or answer her phone. At the trial, she stated: “We are Russian. Buyanova hates Russians. She feels hostility towards me, that’s what I think,” according to a transcript by independent Russian outlet Mediazona. Two hospital staff who saw Akinshina after the consultation with Buyanova described her in evidence as being distraught. The prosecution’s case was based almost entirely on Akinshina’s account, along with a transcript read out in the trial of an interview with the child, conducted by an officer of the FSB security service. At first, Akinshina said the boy was not in the room when the comments were made, but later changed her story, telling the court she originally spoke in a state of shock. The judge rejected the defence’s request to put its own questions to the child. Russian rights group OVD-Info has recorded 21 criminal prosecutions in politically-motivated cases based on denunciations since the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Eva Levenberg, a lawyer with the group, told Reuters. Levenberg, who lives in Germany, said OVD-Info knew of a further 175 people who had faced lower-level administrative charges for “discrediting” the Russian army as a result of people informing on them in the same period, and 79 of these had been fined. Reuters was unable to independently confirm the numbers Levenberg provided. Russia’s Justice Ministry did not respond to requests for comment about the data or the use of denunciations to support prosecutions, including in the Buyanova case. In response to a question posed by Reuters, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin does not comment on court rulings. ‘SCUM AND TRAITORS’ Putin has said the country is in a proxy war with the West, and citizens need to help root out internal enemies. In March 2022, weeks after the invasion, he declared that the Russian people “will always be able to distinguish the true patriots from the scum and the traitors, and just spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths.” Since the start of the Ukraine war, according to OVD-Info, the authorities have detained more than 20,000 people for various forms of anti-war statements or protests, and launched criminal cases against 1,094 individuals. In news reports, court cases and on social media, examples have come to light of neighbour informing on neighbour, churchgoers denouncing priests and students reporting on teachers. For some, the resulting current climate is reminiscent of the atmosphere of mutual distrust and suspicion under Soviet Communist rule. Olga Podolskaya is a former municipal deputy for the Tula region, south of Moscow, who by her own account earned a “pesky” reputation as an independent local politician prepared to stand up to the authorities. In the first hours after the Ukraine invasion, she added her signature to an open letter describing it as “an unprecedented atrocity” and urging citizens to speak out against it. Four months later, she was the subject of a public denunciation that asked for her finances to be investigated after she collected public donations to pay off a fine related to a protest in 2020. The denunciation was filed under the name “Olga Minenkova”, but Podolskaya said no such person was ever identified, and she suspects the identity was a fake one. Reuters has seen a copy of the denunciation, but could not establish who filed it. Further public accusations followed, against her and her husband. Asked how she felt at the time, Podolskaya said it made her think of her great-grandfather, executed under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1938 after someone informed against him. “The time of denunciations and ‘enemies of the people’ had returned. I realised that they were hinting I should leave the country,” said Podolskaya. She left, in April 2023. In September that year she was placed on the Ministry of Justice’s public “foreign agent” list. To protect her security, she asked Reuters not to disclose where she is based now. “FROM A BYGONE ERA” Doctor Andrei Prokofiev was targeted in 2023 by a prolific informer called Anna Korobkova who wrote to his employer demanding he be fired for anti-war comments he made to a foreign news outlet. Korobkova did not reply to a request for comment. In a letter last year to Alexandra Arkhipova, a sociologist who was the target of one of her denunciations, Korobkova said informing was “in her blood” as her grandfather had worked with Stalin’s NKVD secret police. Arkhipova posted the letter on Telegram. Korobkova said she sent 764 denunciations to government agencies in the first year of the war alone, focusing on Russians who speak to foreign media. She likened her work to “using submarines to destroy enemy ships”. Reuters was unable to confirm the extent or impact of her activity. Prokofiev told Reuters he suffered no repercussions, as he lives in Germany. But he fears going back to Russia: “I don’t think I would make it out of the airport. They would start a criminal case right away.” Prokofiev took a particular interest in Buyanova’s case because, when he lived in Russia, his son was one of her patients. He describes her as a quiet, modest person - “an elderly figure from a bygone era” who tapped awkwardly with just one or two fingers on her computer. There has been some pushback against her trial. Prokofiev was among a total of 1,035 doctors who declared solidarity with Buyanova in an open letter, warning the case would put young people off entering medicine. Some of the doctors appeared in their scrubs speaking out in a video compilation posted on Facebook. Alexander Polupan, the doctor behind the Buyanova initiative as well as letters in support of dissidents including the late Alexei Navalny, said at least seven medics were questioned by police after signing them. Reuters could not verify those interrogations, and the Russian interior ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Polupan himself left Russia last year, “when it became clear I would be arrested any day”, he told Reuters. Rachel Denber, Deputy Director of the Europe and Central Asian Division of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said prosecuting an older defendant from a respected profession sent a signal that nobody can afford to defy the official line on Ukraine. Even if Buyanova had said that Russian soldiers on the battlefield were legitimate targets for Ukraine, the assertion would be correct under international law, Denber said. “That is the Geneva Conventions,” she added. International law governing war allows for the use of lethal force against clearly identified enemy combatants in certain situations. At the trial, prosecutors gave details of messages and images on Buyanova’s mobile phone that did not relate to the dispute with Akinshina but were used to present a picture of someone with pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian views. The defence said someone else had used the device and the messages weren’t hers. In her final speech at the summing-up, the doctor was tearful. She asked the court to take into account her age, fragile health and decades of service. Supporters in tee-shirts printed with Buyanova’s unassuming image shouted “shame” at the sentencing. Before the verdict was read, Buyanova expressed shock at what was happening. “I can’t get my head around it,” she told reporters. “Maybe I will later.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russian-ballet-star-vladimir-shklyarov-104333106.html Russian ballet star Vladimir Shklyarov dies after falling from building ... In the days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Shklyarov was quoted as speaking out in support of peace. “I am against the war in Ukraine!" ...
Putin urges Pogroms against Jews in Russia. Putin said the church was “being tortured” — and blamed Jews. Vladimir Putin accuses ‘ethnic Jews’ of tearing apart the Russian Orthodox Church Critics of Putin decried the statement as antisemitic, noting parallels to Soviet state antisemitism under Josef Stalin https://forward.com/fast-forward/68...of-tearing-apart-the-russian-orthodox-church/
Putin's Soviet Purge Escalates 3 lawyers for the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny are jailed by a Russian court https://apnews.com/article/russia-o...lawyers-jail-16aaab94a7e812df7927c40e1104625d Three lawyers who once represented the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny were convicted by a court Friday as part of the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent that has reached levels unseen since Soviet times. Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexei Liptser were already in custody and were given sentences from 3 1/2 to five years by a court in the town of Petushki, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Moscow. They were arrested in October 2023 on charges of involvement with extremist groups, as Navalny’s networks were deemed by authorities. The case was widely seen as a way to increase pressure on the opposition to discourage defense lawyers from taking political cases. At the time, Navalny was serving a 19-year prison term on several criminal convictions, including extremism. He died in a Russian prison camp in February 2023. The independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that Kobzev said in his final statement in court on Jan. 10 that “we are being tried for transmitting Navalny’s thoughts to other people.” The independent Russian news outlet Mediazona reported three journalists attending the sentencing were detained and taken to a police station. Navalny’s networks were deemed extremist following a 2021 ruling that outlawed his organizations — the Foundation for Fighting Corruption and a network of regional offices — as extremist groups. That ruling, which exposed anyone involved with the organizations to prosecution, was condemned by Kremlin critics as politically motivated and designed to stifle Navalny’s activities. According to Navalny’s allies, authorities accused the lawyers of using their position to pass information from him to his team. Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner and outspoken opponent of President Vladimir Putin, was arrested in 2021 upon his return from Germany, where he was recuperating from a nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He was ordered to serve 2 1/2 years in prison. After two more trials, his sentence was extended to 19 years. He and his allies said the charges were politically motivated and accused the Kremlin of seeking to jail him for life. In December 2023, Navalny was moved from a penal colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow to one above the Arctic Circle, where he died in February at the age of 47 under still-unexplained circumstances. His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, and members of his team alleged he was killed on orders from the Kremlin. Officials have rejected the accusation. Two other Navalny lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Alexander Fedulov, are on a wanted list but no longer live in Russia. Mikhailova, who defended Navalny for a decade, said she was charged in absentia with extremism. Kobzev, Liptser and Sergunin have been deemed to be political prisoners, according to human rights advocates from Memorial, Russia’s most prominent rights group that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. The group demands their immediate release. Independent Russian media reported Friday that Konstantin Kotov, an activist accused of donating to Navalny’s organization, left Russia before he was due to appear in a Moscow court Friday. He told Mediazona he decided to leave after a heart surgeon, Ivan Tishchenko, was jailed for four years for donating around $34 to Navalny’s organization.