This year’s Berlin Film Festival is showing only one film from Ukraine: the documentary film Traces was tapped to represent the country. Traces tells the stories of women who survived rape and violence during the war in Donbas and Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine.
The Traces team on the stage of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, 16 February 2026. Source: Berlinale
“I always wished one thing for my pupils: that they would never be forced to take up arms,” Liudmyla Mefodiivna, a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature, says in an interview with Deutsche Welle.
The elderly woman, who taught school for forty-five years, was tortured and raped by a soldier after pro-Russian militias arrived in her village. As he was leaving, her tormentor left a bullet on the table as a warning and a threat: “I’ll come back and kill you if so much as peep.” The teacher’s story, along with [five] other stories of violence and horror, is recounted in the documentary film.
“The occupiers came, and the majority of my pupils rose to Ukraine’s defense. Many of them have been killed, while others have been taken captive or returned from the front severely wounded. It’s terribly painful to witness and survive this. Ukraine is now flowing with blood, and mothers weep over the bodies of their sons, husbands, and family members. Four men have been killed in our family alone, leaving behind young children,” says Mefodiivna.
She recalls that she was unable to talk about her experience for a long time. Her family insisted, though, that her testimony of the atrocity must be heard.
“They beat me, choked me, cut me, knocked out my teeth, and broke my ribs,” Mefodiivna says. “They robbed me of my health. Thanks to the support of these wonderful women I met, I was finally able to start talking. I began to tell my story. I want the whole world to know about the crimes Russia has been committing, about how it has tortured and abused Ukrainians.”
Directors Alisa Kovalenko and Marysia Nikitiuk, along with six of the film’s protagonists, have traveled to the Berlinale to present the film, a testament to their pain. All of them are members of SEMA Ukraine, an organization which helps women who have survived violence. As they sit down for interviews, it is particularly noticeable how nervous they are: their hands are shaking.
Olga from Kherson spent one hundred days in captivity with her son and her husband.
“I was ashamed to talk about [the Russians] did to me. Getting to know the organization was like a breath of fresh air for me,” Olga says. “Now we help other women, and men too. Because men have also been victims of sexualized torture, and yet this is hardly ever discussed.”
Seventy-two-year-old Nina is the most emotional during the interview. She almost immediately begins to weep as she recalls how the war first destroyed her home, and then her life.
“I thought I would have a quiet life in the village, planting trees and waiting for grandchildren. But then the tanks came and the earth burned. And then the monsters came. . . .”
Nina’s face is wracked by sobbing, shame, and grief.
The voice as a weapon
It is shame that prevents victims of violence from testifying against their aggressors, meaning that wartime victims of sexual violence are effectively ignored in the official statistics. When talking about civilian casualties, the focus is usually on those who have been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.
“Those who have survived sexual assault, including in captivity, often go unnoticed and do not receive housing, medical, or mental health assistance from the state. Many suffer from stigmatization, and some cannot cope with what they have experienced,” says the SEMA Ukraine booklet.
The women are fighting to be heard.
“Our voices are the weapons that will punish the perpetrators,” the organization tells victims of violence.
“When I started talking about what I’d survived (this was before the full-scale invasion), I often encountered people seemingly switching off. When I would try to tell them about the most terrible things which had happened to me, their eyes would go blank. They would stop hearing what I was saying. It was like an internal defense mechanism, when what you’re listening to is too painful and unpleasant that you just don’t take on board what’s being said. I believe that this film can break down this barrier, and that after seeing it, people will no longer be able to shut their ears again,’ says SEMA Ukraine founder Iryna Dovhan.
The film opens with Dovhan’s story. In 2014, she was captured by pro-Russian armed groups in Donbas for aiding Ukrainian soldiers. After torturing and abusing her for several days, the pro-Russian militiamen tied her to a pole in downtown Donetsk, wrapped her in an Ukrainian flag, and hung a sign on her that read, “She is murdering our children.” The city’s residents visited the captive to hit, spit on, and insult her.
Dovhan was lucky in some sense: a picture of the helpless woman tied to a pole was taken by a western photographer covering the conflict in Donbas. The photograph was picked up by international media outlets, and Dovhan’s captors were forced to release her.
“I hope that the world will stand with us. I hope that the world will understand that we don’t need sympathy—‘oh, those poor women’—but a joint campaign to make sure this does not happen again in the future and the perpetrators are punished. Otherwise, evil will return again and again,” says Dovhan.
After what she survived, she found the strength to unite and support other women who had suffered.
How the film Traces came to be
The film’s co-director Alisa Kovalenko was also tortured and raped, but she found help at SEMA Ukraine.
“My journey to this film took twelve years. In 2014, I was captured in Donbas and suffered violence. For a long time, I couldn’t talk about it. When I first gave my testimony to human rights activists from the Helsinki Group, I asked, ‘Have you heard many stories like this before?’ They replied, ‘No. You are the first’. It was a shock. I knew there were many more of us, the people whom I had seen with my own eyes in captivity—both men and women.”
The filmmaker describes meeting other women who had gone through the same ordeal as a turning point.
“We sat down together for the first time and started talking. We experienced healing. We felt that we were not alone. And we began to break down the wall of silence step by step.”
It became clear that the traces of the atrocities had to be preserved, but for the filmmakers—Alisa Kovalenko was soon joined by Marysia Nikitiuk—it was extremely important to settle on the right narrative form to preserve the dignity of the victims and not traumatize viewers. Many things in the hours-long filmed accounts of torture, rape, and humiliation did not make it into the final cut.
“We wanted to shove all the worst things in the audience’s faces and shout, ‘Look what they’ve been doing to us!’ But we tried to strike a balance. This film is not meant to shock the viewer. It’s about dignity, about the light that is born in spite of evil. We learned to talk about it the right way, without retraumatizing either the protagonists or the audience. It’s a victim-centered approach,” says Kovalenko. “Some stories were left out due to limited running time—for example, how women in captivity were starved and would share one dumpling a day between four of them, or were forced to sing the Russian national anthem to be allowed to go to the toilet. But these testimonies exist—in books, in human rights reports, in memory.”
Laying the foundations for memory was the goal of the filmmakers. That is why, in Berlin, the women come onstage and recount their experiences once again to the audience, thus overcoming their pain.
“The war gradually fades into the background. Tragedy turns into statistics, and statistics become routine, and that is terrifying,” the filmmakers note. “Traces resurrects the names. They are no longer numbers, but flesh-and-blood women who look the viewer in the eye and speak. A tragedy should have names, not be turned into statistics.”
Both the pot (Iran) and the kettle (the U.S.) are “rounding up” their detractors.
Trump’s White House website welcomes visitors with a pop-up that reads: “WELCOME TO THE GOLDEN AGE!” But on this heavy news day a year into Trump’s second term, it is increasingly clear that as his regime focuses on committing the United States to white Christian nationalism, the country is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, and its own economy is weakening.
At the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s endorsement of white Christian nationalism does not appear to have swayed European countries to abandon their defense of democracy and join the U.S.’s slide toward authoritarianism. Instead, as retired lieutenant general and former commander of U.S. Army Europe Mark Hertling wrote, it squandered the strategic advantage its partnership with Europe has given the U.S.
Foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted that the word in Munich was that “Europe needs to emancipate itself from the U.S. as fast as possible.” In Germany, Der Spiegel reports plans to bring Ukrainian veterans to teach German armed forces drone use and counter-drone practices the Ukrainians are perfecting in their war against Russian occupation. Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney is working to reduce Canada’s defense dependence on the U.S., ramping up domestic defense production.
Carney has advanced a foreign policy that centers “middle powers” and operates without the U.S. That global reorientation has profound consequences for the U.S. economy, as well. Canada is leading discussions between the European Union and a 12-nation Indo-Pacific bloc to form one of the globe’s largest economic alliances. A new agreement would enable the countries to share supply chains and to share a low-tariff system. Canada also announced it is renewing its partnership with China. As of this week, Canadians can travel to China without a visa.
Today France’s president Emmanuel Macron and India’s prime minister Narendra Modi upgraded Indian-French relations to a “Special Strategic Partnership” during a three-day visit of Macron to Mumbai. They have promised to increase cooperation between the two countries in defense, trade, and critical materials.
Trump insisted that abandoning the free trade principles under which the U.S. economy had boomed since World War II would enable the U.S. to leverage its extraordinary economic might through tariffs, but it appears, as economist Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute wrote today for Bloomberg, that the rest of the world is simply moving on without the U.S.
While Trump boasts about the U.S. stock market, which is indeed up, U.S. markets have underperformed markets in other countries. Today, Carl Quintanilla of CNBC reported that the S&P 500, which measures 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in the U.S., is off to its worst year of performance since 1995 when compared to the All Country World Index (ACWI), an index that measures global stocks.
In May 2023 the Florida legislature passed a law requiring employers with 25 or more employees to confirm that their workers are in the U.S. legally. The new law prompted foreign farmworkers and construction workers to leave the state. Now, the Wall Street Journal reported in a February 6 editorial, employers “are struggling to find workers they can employ legally.”
The newspaper continued: “There’s little evidence that undocumented migrants are taking jobs from Americans. The reality is that employers can’t find enough Americans willing to work in the fields or hang drywall, even at attractive wages. Farm hands in Florida who work year-round earn roughly $47,000, which is more than what some young college graduates earn.” “The lesson for President Trump is that businesses can’t grow if government takes away their workers,” the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board concluded.
Today Florida attorney general James Uthmeier reacted to the Wall Street Journal editorial, explaining on Fox Business that the Republican Party expects to replace undocumented workers with young Americans: “We need to focus on our state college program, our trade schools, getting people into the workforce even earlier. We passed legislation last year to help high school students get their hands dirty and get on job sites more quickly. So I think there’s a lot more we can do with apprenticeships, rolling out, beefing up our workforce, and trying to address the demand that is undoubtedly here in the state.”
Steve Kopack of NBC News reported on February 11 that while the U.S. added 1.46 million jobs in 2024, the last year of former president Joe Biden’s administration, it added just 181,000 jobs in 2025. That makes 2025 the worst year for hiring since 2003, aside from the worst year of the coronavirus pandemic. Manufacturing lost 108,000 jobs in 2025.
Peter Grant of the Wall Street Journal reported today that banks that have loaned money to finance the purchase of commercial real estate are requiring borrowers to pay back tens of billions of dollars as the delinquency rate for such loans has climbed to a high not seen since just after the 2008 financial crisis. About $100 billion in commercial real estate loans that have been packaged into securities will come due this year and probably won’t repay when they should. More than half of the loans are likely headed for foreclosure or liquidation.
Trump vowed that he would cut “waste, fraud, and abuse” out of the country’s government programs, but cuts to social programs have been overwhelmed by spending on federal arrest, detention, and deportation programs, as well as Trump’s expansion of military strikes and threats against other countries. In his first year back in office, Trump launched at least 658 air and drone strikes against Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela.
Just today, U.S. Southern Command announced it struck three boats in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean yesterday and killed 11 people it claims were smuggling drugs, bringing the total of such strikes to more than 40 and the number of dead to more than 130. Now Trump is moving American forces toward Iran, threatening to target the regime there.
The administration is simply tacking the cost of these military adventures onto government expenditures, apparently still maintaining that the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations Republicans extended in their July “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and tariffs will address the growing deficit and national debt by increasing economic growth.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) last week projected that the deficit for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2026, will be $1.85 trillion. Richard Rubin of the Wall Street Journal notes that for every dollar the U.S. collects this year, it will spend $1.33. The CBO explained that the Republican tax cuts will increase budget deficits by $4.7 trillion through 2035.
If the American people have suffered from Trump’s reign, the Trump family continues to cash in. Today Trump’s chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Michael Selig, announced he will try to block states from regulating prediction markets, saying they “provide useful functions for society by allowing everyday Americans to hedge commercial risks like increases in temperature and energy price spikes.”
Republicans insist that prediction markets are more like stock trading than like betting, but a group of over 20 Democratic senators warned last week in a letter to Selig that prediction market platforms, where hundreds of millions of dollars are wagered every week, “are offering contracts that mirror sportsbook wagers and, in some cases, contracts tied to war and armed conflict.” They added that the platforms “evade state and tribal consumer protections, generate no public revenue, and undermine sovereign regulatory regimes,” and urged Selig to support regulations Congress has already put into law.
Prediction markets also cover the actions of President Trump, whose son Don Jr. is both an advisor to and an investor in Polymarket and a paid advisor to Kalshi. Polymarket and Kalshi are the two biggest prediction markets, and both are less regulated than betting sites. The Trump family has announced it is starting its own “Truth Predict.”
David Uberti of the Wall Street Journal reported that Eric Trump is investing heavily in drones, particularly in Israeli drone maker Xtend, which has a $1.5 billion deal to merge with a small Florida construction company to take the company public. The Defense Department has invited Xtend to be part of its drone expansion program.
And yet it is clear the administration fears the American people. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), a statewide program that specializes in police shootings, said yesterday that it has received formal notice that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will not allow it any “access to information or evidence that it has collected” related to the shooting death of Minneapolis intensive care nurse Alex Pretti. The BCA says it will continue to investigate and to pursue legal avenues to get access to the FBI files.
Fury at ICE continues to mount, with voices from inside the government complaining about Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, Jonathan Allen, and Julia Ainsley of NBC News reported today on her alienation of senior officials at the Coast Guard as she has shifted their primary mission of search and rescue to flying deportation flights. Noem’s abrupt removal of Coast Guard commandant Linda Fagan only to move into her vacated housing at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling herself also rankled, along with Noem’s lavish use of expensive Coast Guard planes.
Daniel Lippman and Adam Wren of Politico reported today that Noem’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, is resigning.
Marissa Payne of the Des Moines Register reported today that in Iowa, Republican state lawmakers are working to rein in the power of the state governor before the 2026 elections, a sure sign that they are worried that a Democrat is going to win the election.
That fear appears to be part of a larger concern that the American people have turned against the Republicans more generally. Last night, late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert told viewers he had been unable to air an interview he did with a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Texas, James Talarico. “I was told…that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on,” Colbert said. “And because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”
Talarico is a Texas state lawmaker studying to be a minister, who criticizes the Republican use of Christianity as a political weapon. Such politicization of Christianity both distorts politics and cheapens faith, he says. The true way to practice Christianity is simple but not easy, he says: it is to love your neighbor. Political positions should grow out of that to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and heal the sick. “[T]here is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism,” he told Colbert. “It is the worship of power in the name of Christ, and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”
Although Talarico is locked in a tight primary battle with Representative Jasmine Crockett, his message offers a powerful off-ramp for evangelicals uncomfortable with the administration, especially its cover-up of the Epstein files. Without evangelical support, MAGA Republicans cannot win elections.
Talarico has the administration nervous enough that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Brendan Carr opened an investigation of the morning talk show The View after Talarico appeared on the show earlier this month. Lawyer Adam Bonin explained that Carr changed the FCC’s enforcement of the Equal Time Rule (which is not the Fairness Doctrine). It says that when broadcast networks (not cable) give air time to someone running for office, they have to give the same time to any other candidate for that office. The obvious exception is when a candidate does something newsworthy outside the race, in which case a network can interview that person without interviewing everyone else.
For 20 years, that rule has applied to talk shows, but Carr announced last month that if a non-news talk show seems to be “motivated by partisan purposes,” then it will not be exempt. For Colbert’s show, it would have meant that after interviewing Talarico, the network would have had to give equal time to all other Democrats and Republicans running for the Senate seat. CBS could have challenged the rule but chose not to.
Why is the administration worried about Talarico in a state Trump won in 2024 by 14%? “I think that Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas,” Talarico said. “Across the state there is a backlash growing to the extremism and the corruption in our politics…. It’s a people-powered movement to take back our state and take back our country.”
As of 10:00 tonight, Colbert’s 15-minute interview with Talarico has been viewed on YouTube 3.8 million times. Forbes says it is Colbert’s most watched interview in months.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, “Rep. James Talarico On Confronting Christian Nationalism, And Strange Days In The Texas Legislature”
Stephen Colbert hosts Texas State Rep. James Talarico for an online-exclusive interview that touches on the issues raised in Talarico’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for Senate including the separation of church and state, the dangers of consolidated corporate-owned media, and the fabricated culture wars pushed by Republicans in states like Texas.
The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.
In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.
The tech companies, which can choose whether or not to provide the information, have said they review government requests before complying. Some of the companies notified the people whom the government had requested data on and gave them 10 to 14 days to fight the subpoena in court.
“The government is taking more liberties than they used to,” said Steve Loney, a senior supervising attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. “It’s a whole other level of frequency and lack of accountability.” Over the last six months, Mr. Loney has represented people whose social media account information was sought by the Department of Homeland Security.
The department said it had “broad administrative subpoena authority” but did not address questions about its requests. In court, its lawyers have argued that they are seeking information to help keep ICE agents in the field safe.
Meta, Reddit and Discord declined to comment.
“When we receive a subpoena, our review process is designed to protect user privacy while meeting our legal obligations,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement. “We inform users when their accounts have been subpoenaed, unless under legal order not to or in an exceptional circumstance. We review every legal demand and push back against those that are overbroad.”
The Trump administration has aggressively tried tamping down criticism of ICE, partly by identifying Americans who have demonstrated against the agency. ICE agents told protesters in Minneapolis and Chicago that they were being recorded and identified with facial recognition technology. Last month, Tom Homan, the White House border czar, also said on Fox News that he was pushing to “create a database” of people who were “arrested for interference, impeding and assault.”
Silicon Valley has long had an uneasy relationship with the federal government and how much user information to provide it. Transparency reports published by tech companies show that the number of requests for user information from different governments around the world has climbed over the years, with the United States and India among those submitting the most.
Some social media companies previously fought government requests for user information. In 2017, Twitter (now X) sued the federal government to stop an administrative subpoena that asked it to unmask an account critical of the first Trump administration. The subpoena was later withdrawn.
Unlike arrest warrants, which require a judge’s approval, administrative subpoenas are issued by the Department of Homeland Security. They were only sparingly used in the past, primarily to uncover the people behind social media accounts engaged in serious crimes such as child trafficking, said tech employees familiar with the legal tool. But last year, the department ramped up its use of the subpoenas to unmask anonymous social media accounts.
In September, for example, it sent Meta administrative subpoenas to identify the people behind Instagram accounts that posted about ICE raids in California, according to the A.C.L.U. The subpoenas were challenged in court, and the Department of Homeland Security withdrew the requests for information before a judge could rule.
Mr. Loney of the A.C.L.U. said avoiding a judge’s ruling was important for the department to keep issuing the subpoenas without a legal order to stop. “The pressure is on the end user, the private individual, to go to court,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security also sought more information on the Facebook and Instagram accounts dedicated to tracking ICE activity in Montgomery County, Pa., outside Philadelphia. The accounts, called Montco Community Watch, began posting in Spanish and English about ICE sightings in June and, over the next six months, solicited tips from their roughly 10,000 followers to alert people to the locations of agents on specific streets or in front of local landmarks.
On Sept. 11, the Department of Homeland Security sent Meta a request for the name, email address, post code and other identifying information of the person or people behind the accounts. Meta informed the two Instagram and Facebook accounts of the request on Oct. 3.
“We have received legal process from law enforcement seeking information about your Facebook account,” the notification said, according to court records. “If we do not receive a copy of documentation that you have filed in court challenging this legal process within ten (10) days, we will respond to the requesting agency with information.”
The account owner alerted the A.C.L.U., which filed a motion on Oct. 16 to quash the government’s request. In a hearing on Jan. 14 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the A.C.L.U. argued that the government was using administrative subpoenas to target people whose speech it did not agree with.
Sarah Balkissoon, a Department of Justice lawyer representing the government, said the Department of Homeland Security’s position was that it was “within their power to investigate threats to its own officers or impediments to their officers,” according to a court transcript viewed by The Times.
Two days later, the subpoena was withdrawn.
The Montco Community Watch accounts continue to post almost every day. The Times emailed a request for comment to the address associated with the accounts but did not receive a reply.
On Monday, the Instagram account posted an alert for ICE activity in the Eagleville area of Montgomery County. “Montco ICE alert,” the post said. “This is confirmed ICE activity.”
On Friday, the account posted a video of students at Norristown Area High School protesting against ICE. “We stand with you and are proud you made your voices heard!” the post said.
It’s one of the saddest hit songs to grace American music: “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).”
The 1948 Woody Guthrie composition documented a plane crash that killed all 32 people on board in Los Gatos Canyon near the Central Valley town of Coalinga on Jan. 28 of that year. Twenty-eight of the victims were Mexicans being forced back home — some entered the country without papers, some were guest workers whose stints were over — accompanied by the immigration agent charged with making sure they got there, much like the deportation flights of today.
The Associated Press reported that newspapers published across the country the following day — including The Times — listed the names of the Southern California crew on board and the migra man, Frank E. Chaffin of Berkeley.
The Mexicans? The story deemed them “deportees.” They were buried in a mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno under a bronze marker that read: “28 Mexican citizens who died in an airplane accident.” The American government never even bothered to tell their family members. Many wondered what happened to their loved ones for decades.
Guthrie heard the AP report over the radio and was so angered by how the press and government dismissed the deceased that he penned “Deportee.” With mournful chords and vivid lyrics, the working class troubadour attacked an American society that that simultaneously let crops rot “in their creosote dumps” and treated the migrants who picked them “like rustlers, like outlaws, like thieves.”
It’s been covered by some of this country’s greatest musicians — I’m talking Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson (my favorite version is by folk-rock heroes The Byrds).
The Byrds, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” (1969)
Even with “Deportee,” this story had fallen out of public consciousness over the decades. Until January, when ICE dredged it up to once again insult the memory of the lost Mexican immigrants.
ICE’s inexplicable recap
On Jan. 28, the social media accounts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement commemorated Chaffin’s death and only his. The caption alongside a grainy black and white photo of him read: “The plane he was on to deport 28 illegal Mexican aliens caught fire and crashed killing all onboard.”
ICE’s unnecessarily inflammatory language not only was ahistorical, but also it didn’t even match up with its own official account. The agency’s Wall of Honor, which commemorates the lives of employees who died in the line of duty, described the migrants who died alongside Chaffin as “Mexican nationals.”
Such warping of the past isn’t accidental but rather part of a long con by the Trump administration to justify its agenda. In an administration that knows no lows, dismissing the Mexican victims of the Los Gatos Canyon disaster as “illegal Mexican aliens” was particularly egregious.
‘It’s disrespectful, it’s dehumanizing, it’s ICE’
I called up Mike Rodriguez, an ethnic studies teacher in Santa Ana who found out in 2015 that his paternal aunt, María Rodríguez Santana, was on that doomed plane.
“First thing I thought was, ‘Well that’s the United States,’” Rodriguez said of ICE’s social media post. “They’re doing the same thing that the government tried to do in 1948 by erasing them.”
He added that la migra didn’t even bother to list the names of the American crew that died, either. “It’s disrespectful, it’s dehumanizing, it’s ICE,” he said.
But Rodriguez takes solace in knowing he and others are doing their part to make sure people know the full story. He regularly speaks about the tragedy and visited both the site of the crash and Holy Cross Cemetery, where a plaque with all of the victims’ names was erected in 2013.
Tim Z. Hernandez, a University of Texas El Paso professor who has spent much of his career trying to track down descendants, interviewed Rodriguez and his uncle for a forthcoming documentary and also featured their story in the 2024 book”They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir.” The two appeared at an event last year at the Untold Story bookstore in Anaheim, where Rodriguez sung “Deportee” while his son played guitar. He added extra lyrics to honor his Tía María and Hernandez.
“Thankfully, we have truth tellers like Woody Guthrie and Tim,” Rodriguez said. “And I remember what Woody sang — ‘All you fascists bound to lose.’ And that’s the way this is administration is, trying to strip away our constitutional rights. But their day will come.”
Why do we write letters? In the words of Maria Ponomarenko, sentenced to six years in prison for anti-war posts:
I’ve already explained it multiple times that the letters are highly valuable to all of us who are unjustly imprisoned. But I’m ready to repeat it again and again, even 1000 times!
Your letters inspire us, give us strength and confidence that there will be a dawn and the changes are inevitable.
Your letters serve as a support — solid ground beneath our feet.
Your letters are uplifting and help distract us from the unpleasant realities of the Russian penitentiary system.
Write letters to political prisoners! Write, even in the absence of feedback!
The letters are also very important because they demonstrate to the authorities and other inmates that the political prisoner has support outside the prison and is not alone. That we have not been abandoned and have not been forgotten!
Political prisoners find themselves in physical, social and informational isolation. Thanks to the letters, prisoners feel supported and that they are not alone. In pre-trial detention centres, prisons and colonies, it is not often possible to find like-minded people, but letters give prisoners a chance to be heard and a much-needed connection with one another.
In addition, in prison a person quickly ceases to understand what is happening on the outside, so letters are also a way to stay informed about external events: they can be about big news or something less significant, but important for the political prisoner himself (for example, about changes in countries or what is happening in his work\interest spheres, and so on).
Finally, when prisoners receive regular letters, it is an indicator to prison and colony staff that the world outside is paying attention to them, so the risks of pressure are reduced.
This is safe
It is legal and safe to send letters to political prisoners. It is important to remember that all letters go through a censor, but if you follow certain rules you will be safe.
However, there is a list of topics to avoid.
– Do not write about war and combat, such letters will almost certainly not pass the censor.
– Do not write about the details of their criminal case: this may be a painful topic for discussion, but on the other hand, such correspondence may harm them legally.
– Do not write anything about LGBTQ+ people, as based on the history of cases this may harm the political prisoner in the eyes of homophobic prisoners and prison staff.
– Do not write direct insults to the authorities and their representatives or calls to overthrow the government.
– Avoid any topics related to what law enforcement agencies may consider extremism and terrorism.
– In addition, do not use obscure abbreviations, ciphers, foreign words – anything that the censor may not understand or find suspicious. Finally, do not use foul language in your letters.
Where to start
First, you need to decide who you want to write to. You can write to political prisoners whose stories you already know from the news, but it is important that not only media figures receive letters: there are many lesser-known prisoners who need support just as much. You can find their names and stories on our website (general list and religious list of political prisoners), and you can also find addresses where you can write to them. A great reason to start a correspondence would be, for example, a birthday greeting.
What to write about in the first letter
Introduce yourself and tell about your experiences, so that the political prisoner understands who he is communicating with. If you do not want to use your real name, you can sign with a pseudonym – the main thing is that your addressee can later recognize you among other interlocutors.
In an interview with Novaya Gazeta, Elena Efros – founder of the letter-writing project “Tales for Political Prisoners” says: “It’s just the way to write it, a standard text like: Hi, I learned about your case from the media or the Internet, do you want to correspond with me, if yes, what topics are interesting to you. And don’t worry – if you don’t get a reply, just write to someone else.”
How to send letters
The fastest way would be to send one online. Our colleagues from ‘Memorial France’ have launched a service for sending letters to political prisoners in Russia and Belarus.
The website itself is still only available in French, but you can write to political prisoners in different languages: French, English, Belarusian, Russian, and any other are also accepted for translation.
Choose any political prisoner from the lists of Mémorial or Viasna.
Write a letter and paste it into the online form
Our colleagues will translate the text and send it to the addressee
When and if the inmate responds, they will send you their letter
The service has more detailed instructions for each step, as well as recommendations on what to talk about and what to avoid in letters.
You can also use one of the following services available in English:
Letters Across Borders is an OVD-Info project to collect letters to Russian political prisoners in English (or other languages) and translate them for free. You can support the project with a donation.
PrisonMail (payment with international bank cards)
ZT – payment by Russian card only, but the service works in more colonies;
RosUznik – a volunteer project that sends letters in Russian for free or for a donation (you can write from abroad if you translate your letter yourself).
You can also send a paper letter and put something that will please the prisoner: photos, printed pictures, extracts from a magazine, herbarium and so on. You can put unsigned postcards so that the prisoner can send them to their loved ones. Please note that the weight of the letter mustn’t exceed 99 grams and letters in languages other than Russian are highly unlikely to reach the recipient.
Write legibly so that your handwriting can be understood by both the addressee and the censor. When sending a letter, put not only the address but also the full name of the institution on the envelope and write the year of birth after the addressee’s name. If you want a reply, put a blank sheet of paper, another envelope and stamps in the envelope with the letter.
To receive a reply letter, a reply form must be paid for. Usually, the censor sends a scan of the letter to the email address you specify, but it is worth bearing in mind that Prisonmail does not cooperate online with all colonies – then the website when you send the letter will say that you can only receive a reply in paper form.
Kazakh authorities have granted Russia’s request to extradite activist Yulia Yemelyanova, a former employee of the late Alexei Navalny’s Petersburg office. According to the Russian opposition-in-exile’s Anti-War Committee, Kazakhstan violated its own protocols in making the decision to extradite Yemelyanova, as the Russian activist’s application for asylum is still under review in the country.
This past October, Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor General’s Office had guaranteed that extradition requests would not be considered until all administrative procedures related to obtaining asylum were completed. Yemelyanova’s defense intends to appeal the extradition decision to the country’s Supreme Court.
Yemelyanova was detained on Aug. 31, 2025, at Almaty airport while in transit to a third country. She has been held in pretrial detention ever since. In Russia, she is being prosecuted for theft (Part 2, Article 158 of the Criminal Code) in connection with a 2021 incident in which she allegedly stole a mobile phone from a taxi driver. Yemelyanova’s defense calls the case fabricated. It was sent to court in July 2022, by which time the activist had already left Russia.
Yemelyanova is the fourth Russian asylum seeker since late January to be handed a deportation decision from Kazakh officials. The others are Chechen Mansur Movlaev, an open critic of Ramzan Kadyrov; Crimean resident Oleksandr Kachkurkin, who is facing treason charges in Russia; and Yevgeny Korobov, an officer who deserted from the Russian army.
Dmytro Kulyk with his wife Oksana and daughter Elina. Source: Daily Beast
A Ukrainian dad escaped Vladimir Putin’s drone and missile attacks back home only to be grabbed by a band of ICE stooges in a Walmart parking lot in Minneapolis.
“I hoped I would find peace in America. I’ve done everything the government required, I don’t understand why I am behind bars,” Dmytro Kulyk told the Daily Beast from the Kandiyohi County Jail in Willmar, Minnesota.
The 39-year-old father was getting a pickup order at a Walmart in Maple Grove when he found himself surrounded by immigration agents last month. He’d been working as a delivery driver to make ends meet, while also supporting his family by doing roofing work.
Kulyk legally entered the U.S. in late 2023 along with his wife, 38, and daughter, who’s now 5. The family was sponsored by U.S. citizens as part of the Uniting 4 Ukraine program, a humanitarian program set up in April 2022 to allow Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war to live and work in the U.S. on “parole.”
Once the initial two-year parole period expires, entrants can file for re-parole to remain in the country longer. That’s exactly what Kulyk says he did. His wife and daughter’s applications were approved. But his remained pending.
He said he was putting groceries in his car on Jan. 1 when he was approached by three ICE agents.
“I explained to the ICE officers that the war was killing people, that my wife had a disability, that it was violence, terrorism which we had escaped from but one of them began to laugh,” Kulyk told The Daily Beast. “I asked why he was laughing and I was told that he was pro-Russian, wanted Russia to win the war.”
DHS and ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
He can’t understand why he’s been treated like a criminal. He did everything by the book, he says–paying taxes and filing his immigration paperwork on time, working multiple jobs to take care of his family. He had no criminal record to speak of.
His immigration attorney, Julia Bikbova, suggested his re-parole application may have intentionally been stalled to provide immigration authorities with a pretext to deport him.
“Our government, our Homeland Security, promised Ukrainians to protect them during the war. There are approximately 280,000 Ukrainians on U4U, Uniting for Ukraine program in the United States, including the Kulyk family,” she told the Daily Beast.
“My client did everything the government required him to do: on June 5 he applied for the re-parole and his wife paid $2,040 of fees for her and child’s granted applications. His wife and daughter have recently received their re-paroles but he has not, his application is pending.
“ICE detained him as ‘illegal’ and began deportation proceedings: This is a sick way of forcing a man with a clean criminal record to become unlawful in the U.S. by delaying the review of his application, which the very same authority had requested to file.”
Kulyk is now terrified he’ll be sent to the frontlines to fight Vladimir Putin’s troops if he is deported back home. He and his family endured relentless Russian attacks before finally deciding to flee their home in the Odesa region in 2023. When they saw ruins on their own street in Chornomorsk, they called their friends in Texas and asked for help, leading to their enrollment in the U4U program thanks to having U.S. citizens as sponsors.
Kulyk now can’t stop worrying about his wife, Oksana, and daughter, Elina.
“I am worried they can drag my wife and kid out of our home,” he told The Daily Beast, adding that he wanted to appeal directly to American authorities to make them understand he’d done nothing wrong.
“Please hear me: I came to America to escape the war, to pray in church and work hard. But now my heartbroken and sick wife has lost over 10 pounds since ICE arrested me on January 1. She’s been panicking, and my little daughter has been crying without me every night – this is unjust,” he said.
Oksana says she’s been too “terrified and lost” to leave home while her husband is locked up, afraid that immigration agents might return for the rest of the family.
“I am too scared to drive my 5-year-old daughter to school in my husband’s car. I’m terrified ICE will detain me and our daughter will end up alone,” she told The Daily Beast. “This is just as scary as the war in Ukraine, except now we don’t have Dmytro with us. Our daughter Elina cries herself to sleep with her cat plushie. She says the toy is daddy.”
Most Ukrainian refugees are women and children but some men have also left the country for various reasons. Kulyk was granted a permit to leave in order to care for a family member with a medical condition.
But Kulyk is not the only Ukrainian refugee to be swept up in the Trump administration’s controversial immigration crackdown.
Nearly 1,000 miles away, in Philadelphia, Zhanna was poring over messages in a group chat of 349 other refugees called “Ukrainians in Detention.” She joined the group last month, when her friends Andrii and Yaroslav ended up in detention. Although Bartosh has legal Temporary Protected Status, she stopped going to the office and now works from home.
“ICE rounds up men who buy tools or work in construction, so every day I call my husband, a construction worker, to check if he is OK. Even when the war started in Ukraine and we had to escape abroad, the same morning I wasn’t as stressed as I am now,” she told the Daily Beast. “In our chat I read that all arrestees are men, that at least five of them have signed up for self-deportation… but where is there to go now? Europe is also deporting Ukrainians. Our TPS is good until October but we want to understand, are we really legal in the United States, or is it time to pack up our suitcases again?”
Immigration attorneys count about 300 cases of detained Ukrainians across the United States and up to 150 refugees deported to Ukraine, Bikbova said.
“Most of the arrested Ukrainians are men, the majority of them have a clean criminal record but as we see in Kulyk’s case, they are equated to people who jumped the border, broke the law,” attorney Bikbova told the Daily Beast. “Behind every deported man, there are crying women and children, left without support. For some mysterious reason, we see male Ukrainian refugees being arrested and put on airplanes. If he gets deported, my client Kulyk will most certainly go to the front.”
Trump’s administration has also been deporting Russian asylum seekers. According to a report by Current Times, more than 50,000 Russians have fled the war and political repression to the U.S. since February 2022. Journalist Ilya Azar has been covering the deportations for Novaya Gazeta.
“They send out 40-60 people on each plane. There have been five airplanes,” Azar told the Daily Beast on Tuesday. The deportation planes transit to Russia through Egypt, and Russian security services meet the deported citizens. Azar’s report noted that “all men received draft notices” upon their arrival in December.
German authorities last week denied asylum to 47-year-old engineer Georgy Avaliani, who deserted from the front line in 2022. His wife and two children were rejected alongside him.
“There is no reason to believe that, upon returning to the Russian Federation, they would face a high probability of persecution or serious harm,” wrote an official from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), despite Avaliani’s account of being tortured after fleeing the front.
Mediazona has reviewed BAMF decisions in Avaliani’s case and those of other deserters, discovering that officials are producing boilerplate documents that repeat one another almost word for word. In justifying the refusals, the German agency argues, for instance, that mobilisation in Russia was intended to “strengthen the armed forces” rather than repress dissent, and therefore cannot be considered political persecution. They further say that mobilisation has effectively ended because Vladimir Putin announced it—verbally.
When describing potential punishments for deserters, officials cite not the criminal code but an administrative article regarding failure to comply with military registration duties. They even specify that the maximum penalty is a fine of €302.
Most notably, in every decision examined, BAMF cites Mediazona’s own article from 2023, “Evading > refusing > fleeing. A year of mobilization in Russia through trials and verdicts”, as evidence that mobilised men face little more than a fine. That article noted that, at the time of publication, failing to respond to a summons did not yet carry a heavy penalty. While the situation has since changed—an eventuality the original article warned about—the original reference remains in the German files.
Relying on information from that article is also fundamentally flawed because BAMF applies it to people already wanted under serious criminal charges for desertion or abandoning their unit. In its rulings, the agency ignores the severity of these consequences, lumping deserters in with those who simply left Russia when mobilisation was first announced. This is exactly what happened to Georgy Avaliani.
A year in a refugee camp
Avaliani, an engineer, arrived in Germany with his wife, Oksana, and their two children on January 26, 2025. By then Georgy, who was drafted shortly after mobilisation began and later deserted, had been on a federal wanted list for over six months.
The family was granted asylum-seeker status without an initial investigation into the specifics of their escape. Like other applicants, they were placed in temporary housing: a small portacabin with two bunk beds at the former Tempelhof airport site. Their journey to Germany had been arduous. On January 18, Georgy, who had managed to leave Russia before his name appeared on the wanted list, met his wife and children in Bosnia. From there, they travelled to the Croatian border and requested asylum.
In Croatia, the asylum process is largely a formality; in practice, obtaining protection there is nearly impossible. Consequently, many migrants use it only as an entry point into the EU before heading to countries with functioning reception systems. The Avalianis did the same. After a preliminary registration in Croatia, they spent a week travelling to Berlin.
For nearly a year, the family was cramped in a camp with 2,000 other applicants. Finally, just before the start of 2026, they were moved to a hostel in western Berlin. But Georgy’s hopes of integration (he had been diligently learning German and hoped to return to engineering) were soon shuttered. On January 16, just two weeks after their move, BAMF rejected the entire family’s asylum claim.
Avaliani intends to appeal. If he fails, the family must leave Germany within 30 days or face deportation to Russia, where Georgy faces up to 10 years in prison for abandoning his unit during a period of mobilisation. Despite having clear evidence of persecution, the German authorities have ignored his claims.
The two escapes of Private Avaliani
Before the war, Georgy Avaliani was a well-paid engineer at the Moscow water utility, Mosvodokanal. He had no plans to leave Russia. Shortly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he even enrolled in a seminary to pursue a religious education.
Georgy had never served in the army due to a heart condition. However, following the “partial mobilisation” announcement, he received a summons on October 6, 2022. At the time, his three children were minors; by law, as the father of a large family, he should have been exempt. The couple tried to contest the draft through the military enlistment office and the prosecutor’s office but failed. Georgy chose not to go into hiding, unwilling to abandon his family.
After a medical commission in November, he was sent to a training camp in the Moscow region and then to the occupied Svatove district of the Luhansk region. His unit was stationed in the village of Novoselivske, 20 km from the front line. After a few days, noticing the chaos within the unit, Avaliani decided to slip away, gambling that no one would notice his absence. He reached a nearby road and hitched a ride to the village of Troitske, a gathering point for mobilised men.
Part of a local hospital had been turned into a shelter for soldiers with nowhere else to go—some had lost their units, others were waiting to withdraw their pay, and some were recovering from wounds.
While staying there, Georgy met another mobilised soldier. They shared the same grim impression of the front and a desperate desire to return home. They found three others who felt the same and hired a taxi driver to take them to a spot where they could cross the border on foot.
After the driver dropped them off, the group split up. Along the way, Avaliani and his companion heard a helicopter. Georgy later told journalists and BAMF officials that the second group had been gunned down from the air. While there is no independent confirmation of this, Avaliani and the other man survived only to be detained in an abandoned village.
There is little doubt Georgy made this journey on foot; “Goodbye to Arms”, a project that assists deserters, thoroughly verified his route. Alexei Alshansky, a coordinator for the organisation, says the helicopter story is the only detail rights activists have been unable to confirm.
Following his capture, Avaliani was thrown into “a basement” for 10 days. He says he was beaten repeatedly and subjected to mock executions. Mediazona has previously reported on this location, known as the Zaitsevo Centre for the Detention of Servicemen, based on the testimony of another deserter, Sergei Savchenko. Volunteers from “Goodbye to Arms” identified the site in the occupied village of Rassypne by comparing testimonies with video footage.
From the basement, Georgy was sent to an assault unit. Two days later, an ammunition dump near their position exploded. Avaliani suffered a concussion and a heart attack. He was sent to a distribution point where he befriended the doctor issuing referrals. The medic sent him to a hospital inside Russia, hinting that he could just as easily head straight for Moscow instead of the ward.
Avaliani did exactly that. After reuniting with his family, he hid at a dacha in the Tula region. Occasionally, he ventured to Lyubertsy for medical treatment. As time passed he grew less cautious, but in mid-February 2024 military police arrested him outside his home.
He was sent to Kaliningrad in western Russia, the permanent base of his unit, to await his fate. When a commander learned of Georgy’s engineering background, he set him to work renovating his private dacha. Meanwhile, Georgy pushed for a formal medical commission. When it finally took place, the results were surprising: he was not only declared fit for service but his category was upgraded from “partially fit” to “fit with minor restrictions”.
In May, he was told to report for questioning regarding a criminal case. Georgy fled again. On the way to the commander’s dacha, he got a taxi and flew to St Petersburg. His wife met him there to hand over his passport. From there he flew to Belarus, then Uzbekistan, Georgia and finally Montenegro, where he was taken in by a Swedish artist for whom he helped build a swimming pool.
Oksana remained in Lyubertsy with the children. Weeks after her husband left, an investigator began calling her. Georgy was placed on a federal wanted list.
In September 2024, security forces raided the family home. They confiscated phones from Oksana and the children, returning them only two weeks later. The stress caused Oksana to suffer a nervous breakdown, leading to a month-long stay in a psychiatric clinic. The visits from military police continued; the last raid occurred on January 7, 2025. After that, Oksana finally agreed to leave Russia.
Georgy has spoken openly to the press about his escape. In Montenegro, he was interviewed by Current Time TV. The family crossed the German border accompanied by a journalist from Die Welt, which later published a detailed account. A report for the Franco-German channel Artewas also filmed by Russian journalist in exile Masha Borzunova.
The first six months in Germany were particularly precarious. Under EU law, the migration service could have deported the family back to Croatia, their first point of entry. To prevent this, Georgy sought help from the church.
The tradition of Kirchenasyl, or church asylum, began in 1983 after Cemal Kemal Altun, a 23-year-old Turkish activist, took his own life in a West Berlin court while facing extradition. His death moved church communities to unite to protect refugees from deportation. Every year, hundreds of people receive a reprieve through this practice. The Avalianis were among them.
“It is a semi-legal, more like a cultural phenomenon that works differently in different states,” explains Alshansky. “The church gives the applicant a document stating they are under their care, and the authorities leave them alone.”
Thanks to this intervention, BAMF could not reject the family simply because they entered via Croatia. They were forced to consider the case on its merits. They rejected it anyway.
BAMF’s motivation
During his personal hearing, Georgy Avaliani detailed his service and desertion. When asked what he feared if returned to Russia, he replied: “I fear for my life. Legally, I could be imprisoned for up to 20 years. But more likely, I will be killed before trial or in prison… I know for certain that if they find me, a subhuman death awaits me.”
His wife, Oksana, tried to explain the psychological toll the military police raids had taken on her and the children. The family provided lots of evidence: the mobilisation order, the wanted notice from the interior ministry’s website, a letter from a German humanitarian organisation, medical records and Georgy’s military ID.
In its rejection, the agency claimed the Avalianis were “apolitical people”, making it unclear why they believed the Russian state would view them as opponents. BAMF argued that if they were truly targeted, Georgy would never have been able to leave Russia so easily.
Having erroneously stated that Avaliani faced only an administrative fine, the official added that it was “not evident that in the applicants’ case, due to specific circumstances, a different [punishment] should apply”.
The document also asserted that officials found no evidence that mobilisation continued after Putin’s verbal announcement. Even if it were to resume, BAMF argued, it was not certain Avaliani would be called up again, given Russia’s 25 million reservists.
“Even taking into account that the applicant evaded mobilisation, it is not to be expected that… he would be subjected to the inhuman or degrading treatment required to grant asylum,” the decision stated.
The agency concluded the family could lead a dignified life in Russia. Despite the economic crisis, the official noted that people in Russia are still provided with food, social benefits and pensions. “It is not seen that… they would find themselves in a completely hopeless situation,” the ruling said. Their physical and mental health was also deemed insufficient to require treatment specifically in Germany.
A template for rejection
Alshansky attributes the BAMF decision to the wave of draft evaders who fled to Europe after 2022.
“A crowd of people rushed to claim asylum over mobilisation, some without even a summons,” he says. “I think they have exhausted the Germans to the point where, as soon as they see a Russian applicant and the word ‘mobilisation’, they just churn out this rejection.” Artyom Klyga, from the rights organisation Connection E. V., confirms that around 1,000 Russians have requested asylum in Germany due to mobilisation.
Alshansky points out that the rejection text clearly treats Avaliani as a mere draft dodger rather than a man who fled the front and is now a fugitive. He believes BAMF compiled the document from fragments of other cases without truly studying Georgy’s story. “I have compared this rejection with others. It is a template; paragraph after paragraph is identical. They just changed the personal details in a Word file,” Klyga agrees.
Mediazona compared several BAMF decisions regarding Russians who fled mobilisation. The similarities are striking. In the case of a young man who left after an attempt to serve him a summons, the agency also cited Putin’s words on the end of mobilisation. The description of the economic situation in Russia—including the detail that 15% of Russians live below the poverty line—is identical in both his and Avaliani’s files.
In another case involving a reservist who left on a tourist visa, the agency used the same argument: that mobilisation is about military strength, not political vengeance. That document also cited the same €302 fine.
The same arguments were used against Anton Sh., a deserter from Ufa whose story was covered by Sever.Realii. He had been tortured in the same Zaitsevo cellar, where guards pulled out almost all of his teeth. Despite his ordeal and the fact he is wanted in Russia, BAMF ruled he faced no danger because he had been able to leave the country freely.
Georgy Avaliani is now consulting with lawyers to appeal. “From my interview, it is perfectly clear that my situation is different [from other cases BAMF cited in the rejection]. This rejection shows that these people either cannot read or didn’t bother to try,” he said.
Even if his appeal fails, Georgy has no intention of returning. “I didn’t come here for tastier sausage, but to avoid dying in prison,” he says. “I had a good job in Russia. I will never reach that standard of living here; I’m not 20 or even 30 years old anymore. I didn’t travel far for a better life. I left solely because of persecution. Pity they don’t understand that.”
“Goodbye to Arms” estimates there are currently about 100 Russian deserters in Germany. For others planning to follow Avaliani’s route through Croatia, Alshansky recommends heading to other countries, such as Spain, where he says the bureaucratic logic remains more straightforward than in Germany.
In documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of sexually trafficking minors, the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University [aka Smolny College] is mentioned about thirty times.
Bumaga has examined some of the so-called Epstein files. Read how the American was invited to the graduation ceremony at Smolny and how the financier himself recommended the Petersburg university to fashion models.
How Epstein was invited to a graduation ceremony at St. Petersburg State University
In May 2013, Alexei Kudrin, then dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, sent an invitation to Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, to attend the graduation ceremony. Botstein, in turn, invited Jeffrey Epstein to accompany him to Petersburg. Faculty co-founder Valery Monakhov also emailed an invitation to the American financier to visit St. Petersburg State University.
The program included an official ceremony in St. Petersburg State University’s auditorium on University Embankment and a ball at the Bobrinsky Palace[the home of Smolny College]. During the graduation ceremony, Leon Botstein planned to introduce Epstein to Kudrin, who was not only the head of the faculty but also a former Russian finance minister. The financier himself had already been convicted of trafficking minors.
Epstein never went to St. Petersburg State University, however: his assistant, Lesley Groff, responded to the invitations by saying that her boss was busy.
How Epstein partly financed Bard College
Bard College is a private tertiary educational institution in the United States that collaborated with St. Petersburg State University for over twenty years. The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences was established with its involvement. The collaboration continued until 2021, when Bard College was declared an “undesirable organization” in Russia. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office declared that the work of the university “poses a threat to the foundations of the constitutional order and security.” Russian academics and artists decried the sanctions against the college as yet another blow to research and education in Russia.
In 2023, Wall Street Journal reporters revealed that, in 2016, Epstein had donated $150,000 to Bard College President Leon Botstein and transferred $270,000 for Professor Noam Chomsky. Epstein had previously donated funds to the college on several occasions, including $75,000 in 2011.
According to media reports, Bard College scholars met with Epstein on several occasions after the financier was charged with soliciting prostitution from minors in 2008.
Meanwhile, according to journalists, Botstein sat on the advisory board of Epstein’s foundation. The president of Bard College, however, has claimed that he did not perform any work for the foundation.
How Epstein advised young female models to apply to Smolny
The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences—Smolny College—appears several times in Epstein’s correspondence with women who mention that they work in the modeling business. We do not know whether Epstein was corresponding with one young woman or several. The names of potential victims have been redacted in most of the files.
In 2018, Epstein met with the “President of Smolny” (whether this was Alexei Kudrin or officials at Bard College is not known) to discuss the process of applying to St. Petersburg State University and subsequently transferring to Bard College.
Epstein then counseled his female acquaintance as follows:
“first year smolny but the credits are us credits transferable to any us school,” he writes.
“I’m afraid to leave USA now,” she replies.
“I understand however the transfer program is great,” he writes.
Epstein also sent links to Smolny’s programs to a model in 2019. He had invited his correspondent to visit him in Paris, while the young woman suggested they sleep together that night. “you can visit for 30 minutes. I want to know more about university desire , I will let you go early to get some sleep,” Epstein replied.
In 2018, a young Russian woman named Anna is mentioned in Epstein’s online correspondence. The financier tried to connect her with his acquaintances from Bard College so that they could “help her make a decision about Smolny.” Epstein’s assistants booked tickets for the young woman to Paris, Tel Aviv, and the United States.
Bumaga noticed that the information about Anna as contained in the correspondence coincides with the biographical details of a model from Petersburg. Judging by the young woman’s age, she was not a minor at the time of her interactions with Epstein. In 2017–2019, photos taken in France and Israel appeared on her social media pages. Her name was not subsequently mentioned on the websites of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences or Bard College.
Anna had not responded to our message by the time this article was published.
Who was Epstein and how else is Petersburg mentioned in his case files?
Jeffrey Epstein was a former mathematics teacher and billionaire who had close ties to the world’s political, business, and academic elites. Epstein was the central figure in one of the most high-profile criminal cases of the twenty-first century after he was charged with sexually exploiting and trafficking minors. The American was first convicted in 2008 under a lenient plea bargain deal with prosecutors, but he was re-arrested on federal charges in 2019. Epstein died in prison shortly after his arrest. His death was ruled a suicide, but the official account is still a matter of controversy in the U.S.
The documents published by the U.S. authorities on the Epstein case contain mentions of world leader and other influential figures, including U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk. However, the fact that individuals are mentioned in the files does not imply that there are grounds for charges against them.
Petersburg is mentioned over a thousand times in the released files. Earlier, Bumagareported that, between 2014 and 2016, Epstein corresponded and met with Sergei Belyakov, former Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Chairman of the Board of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
In July 2015, at Epstein’s request, Belyakov made inquiries into a certain young woman from Moscow who was allegedly attempting to blackmail businessmen in New York. Belyakov set about his search for information without asking any questions and, a couple of days later, replied that the Russian woman in question was working as an escort and, during the peak season from May to August, earned more than $100,000.
According to the Dossier Center, the woman in question was a model named Guzel [Ganieva] who in March 2021 accused American billionaire Leon Black of coercing her into performing sadistic sexual acts. Guzel claimed that Black had introduced her to Epstein and tried to force her to have sex with “his best friend,” but the Russian woman refused.
Epstein also assisted Belyakov with organizing SPIEF 2015 and the Open Innovations Forum. The American financier did not attend the economic forum himself, but he introduced[link not functioning currently] Belyakov to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who ended up appearing SPIEF 2015.
Epstein also suggested “dream attendes” for the forums to Belyakov and promised to provide contact information for former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The meeting with the latter took place only in 2016.
In April 2018, Belyakov also planned to send a letter to the Russian consulate in New York requesting that Epstein be granted a three-year visa to Russia.
Belyakov is currently the president of the Association of Nongovernmental Pension Funds. He declined our request for a comment.
Wajahat Ali, “EXPOSED: Epstein & the Far‑Right Plot to Undermine DEMOCRACY”
What if Jeffrey Epstein’s influence wasn’t just about sex trafficking scandals but part of a broader far‑right agenda to destabilize democratic institutions worldwide? In this explosive video, we break down the latest revelations from the Epstein Files and explore how his network may have intersected with powerful right‑wing actors, online extremists, and political operatives. Investigative journalist Ryan Broderick joins us to unpack the latest revelations from the Epstein Files, revealing how his network intersected with powerful political actors, extremists, and online operators.
Yevgeny Korobov, a former officer of the Russian army, stands in the middle of the room dressed casually in a black shirt and light pants. The 30-year-old has been living in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, for almost three years.
He says that during this time seven or eight other deserters have stayed in his apartment.
“I try as best I can to help people like me. You don’t need to pay me, just live here, that’s all,” he says. “Who else will help them? After all, there is something that binds us. We are all deserters. We all ran.”
Just four years previously, Korobov was fighting in Ukraine from February to May 2022.
‘The war has begun’
Korobov had always wanted to be in the military, although his parents were postal workers. He studied at a military college in his native Krasnoyarsk, before joining the Russian army as “a young officer full of enthusiasm to serve”. His contract was to last until 2023.
His enthusiasm soon soured, however.
“During service in the army you encounter injustice and madness, and you begin to become completely disillusioned with everything, with how things are in Russia,” he says.
In early 2022, Korobov was sent to military exercises in the Kursk region, near the Ukrainian border. “I didn’t believe there would be a war, but we went there with anxiety,” he recalls.
He describes what he saw after crossing the border into Ukraine: “We drove through populated areas. People were living their lives, someone was refueling a car, someone was drinking coffee, someone smoking. And we’re driving. The war has begun.”
His brigade moved towards the capital Kyiv, stopping in the Brovary district east of the city.
This is the area where the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office says that Russian soldiers had carried out war crimes. [Investigations by the] outlets Meduza and Radio Liberty allege that soldiers of the 15th Brigade, where Korobov was based, had set up a torture chamber in a post office in the Kyiv region. Journalists also reported on the execution of at least five civilians by the same brigade.
Korobov claims that he personally did not witness war crimes, but heard about them from others. He says that his job was to escort rear columns, navigation and route reconnaissance during the war, and that therefore he was constantly on the move.
His brigade was near Kyiv until the end of March, after which he left the region when Russian forces retreated following the failed attempt to encircle the Ukrainian capital.As he retreated, Korobov saw destroyed Ukrainian towns. He says this caused him “horror and disappointment”.
Korobov says that the columns ran into ambushes by several Ukrainian forces.
“We had to fire back,” he recalls. “What else could we do? Die? Am I a good person if I died? I also wanted to live and wanted all my soldiers to return. What were we fighting for? For our lives. The Ukrainians had an enemy — us. We had two enemies — the Ukrainians and our own commanders.”
The ‘war hero’
At the end of 2022, just before he finally deserted and left Russia for Kazakhstan, Korobov was ordered by his commander in Moscow to appear on Russian television.
The show painted him as a war hero who had been injured in battle.
“Senior Lieutenant Yevgeny Korobov, together with his group, was escorting a rear column,” said the host of a popular evening talk show on Channel One. “They ran into an ambush. They fought superior enemy forces. They destroyed at least 15 militants and enemy equipment. They themselves had no losses.”
Korobov calls the story, first reported by the Russian defence ministry, fabricated. He says his unit did run into an ambush at the beginning of March 2022 in the Chernihiv region, but that the extent of the ordeal was greatly exaggerated.
A still of “war hero” Yevgeny Korobov’s appearance on Russian TV. Source: smotrim.ru/BBC News Russian
“Fell into an ambush — yes. ‘Carefully prepared’ — hardly. Whether the enemy’s numbers were superior, I don’t know how many people were there or who was firing,” retorts Korobov.
After appearing in the media, he received a medal for courage for which Korobov says he “couldn’t care less”. “For an invented feat? For a war I didn’t want to take part in? I already didn’t want to serve in the army at all — I was just enduring until my contract ended.”
What Korobov does not dispute is that he was injured in Ukraine. During the course of the television interview, he is noticeably limping.
‘No way back’
Korobov was wounded in the leg in Donetsk in May 2022 after which he was evacuated and returned to Russia.
At the time, the command was issued to assault the village of Ozerne, near Lyman. “Only once were we able to get close to it; we were hit with everything possible, and during all the following assaults we couldn’t even approach,” says Korobov.
“At that point I already understood that there was no chance we would be allowed to go home. And that the only way to leave there was as dead or wounded.”
One day, their unit accidentally landed a drone on Ukrainian positions. Korobov says his unit of four people was sent to retrieve it and told by his commanding officer not to return without it — a mission that he describes as impossible.
“I understood that that was it, there was no way back,” he says. “And I opened fire on my own soldiers. I fired a burst into the ground. I wounded my guys. Then I wounded myself, shot myself. I provided first aid, and we crawled towards evacuation.”
This suggests that the injury that was reported and celebrated on the television program Let Them Talk was one Korobov inflicted on himself.
The BBC cannot independently verify Korobov’s account, although he provided photographs of his wounded leg.
Korobov and the remnants of his platoon were then evacuated from the frontline. He spent a month and a half in a hospital, then underwent rehabilitation.
Korobov wanted to serve out his contract in Russia until 2023, without returning to Ukraine. However, after the announcement of further mobilisation in September 2022, all contracts became indefinite. At the end of that year, he was informed that he would be sent back to Ukraine.
Looking for asylum
Korobov says that before leaving Russia he contacted the Go By The Forest project, which helps former Russian soldiers like himself who fear returning to the war in Ukraine. Activists then drew up a route for him to escape to Kazakhstan.
Soon he had packed a bag and left Russia.
A criminal case for desertion has since been opened against Korobov, and he faces up to 15 years in prison. Because of this, for the first months of life in Astana he hardly left the house.
Later, he found a job at a bar — illegally, because, as an asylum-seeker, he wasn’t permitted to work there.
“Kazakhstan has not granted asylum to a single Russian citizen yet, and I think it won’t,” says Korobov.
“We are waiting for a decision from European countries, especially from France, because at the moment it is the only country that has accepted Russian deserters,” he says.
Korobov understands the reluctance of Western countries to accept Russian deserters, but believes that this is one of the “effective ways of resolving the conflict: not only supplying weapons and imposing sanctions, but also giving Russians the opportunity to refuse to carry weapons, to refuse to fight.”
The BBC spoke to Artur Alkhastov, a lawyer from the Kazakhstan Bureau for Human Rights, who has been helping Russian deserters who fled to the country during the past three years. Part of the process is to verify the former soldiers, in order to prevent agents of the Russian security services from infiltrating the group.
He says verifying Korobov’s story was difficult and took time.
In his view, a Russian deserter today is in even greater danger than many other opponents of the war or political dissidents, because the Russian authorities see these former soldiers as traitors.
This puts Russian deserters in Kazakhstan and Armenia in a vulnerable position, because both countries host Russian military bases.
Korobov and other deserters can currently be protected from extradition to Russia because they hold the status of asylum seekers, but this does not protect them from the threat of abduction, Alkhastov explains.
Kenyan job seekers were lured to Russia, then sent to die in Ukraine. Source: msn.com
Hundreds of Kenyans have been recruited by the Russian military to serve on the front lines in Ukraine, according to former recruits and their families. Many have never returned.
Most men said they were tricked — offered civilian or “safe” security jobs in Russia, only to be handed a weapon and sent to the battlefield. Others were current or former soldiers who joined up as mercenaries, lured by promises of higher wages. The survivors described inhumane treatment by Russian commanders and harrowing scenes of slaughter.
While there have been isolated reports of Africans conscripted by Moscow to fight, The Washington Post uncovered an extensive clandestine pipeline stretching from Nairobi to the forests of eastern Ukraine. Russian recruitment in Kenya is more widespread, and more deadly, than previously reported, and the effort extends across the continent. The Post spoke to recruits or their family members in South Africa, Botswana, Tanzania and Nigeria, and it heard anecdotal accounts of fighters in Ukraine from eight other African countries, including Ghana, Zimbabwe and Cameroon — hidden victims of the largest European conflict since World War II.
The phenomenon is driven by two converging forces: economic desperation in Kenya, pushing young men to pursue vague promises of work thousands of miles from home, and the Russian military’s boundless appetite for fresh bodies, as it seeks to press its advantage in Ukraine without sending more of its own to die. In the middle are African recruiters, operating with direct or implicit help from political connections. Kenyan authorities have repeatedly urged young men to immigrate to Russia despite evidence that employment agencies are steering job seekers into combat.
This account is based on interviews with four Kenyans who fought in Ukraine — three of whom were wounded — and family members of nine other Kenyan recruits, including active-duty soldiers who traveled to Russia to join the military. Some came from specialized units run by military intelligence, or from the elite SPEAR team that guards the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. The Post reviewed corroborating documents from the men sent to fight, as well as messages between recruiters and family members desperate for news of their loved ones.
Two of the injured Kenyans, neither of whom had military experience, said they were sent to fight in Ukraine with only a few days of training in a language they did not speak.
“They said: ‘Learn fast. We are taking you to the war,’” said the first man, whose hands were lacerated by shrapnel from a drone strike. He crossed rivers full of bodies on his first day, he said, and saw most of his party killed.
“I didn’t even see any people,” said the second Kenyan, who suffered burns to his head and hands in a separate incident. “It was just robots — drones — shooting at us.” Like others in this story, the men spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing for their safety and for their fellow Africans still in the line of fire.
In November, Ukraine’s foreign minister said his government had identified 1,436 citizens from 36 African countries fighting for Russia.
“They are treated as second-rate, expendable human material,” Andrii Sybiha said in a post on X. Most, he added, “do not survive more than a month.”
Those who aren’t killed are often captured and imprisoned, survivors said, or wounded and prevented from returning home. Former recruits said those who refused to go to the front lines were threatened with arrest in Russia; others were deployed to deadly positions after their families talked to the media.
The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
The Kenyan government told The Post that it had learned of the recruitment schemes only through media reports three or four months ago, and that it was constrained by diplomatic norms. “Our ambassador [in Moscow] doesn’t have jurisdiction to leave his office and go into morgues,” said Hellen Gichuhi, Kenya’s secretary for diaspora welfare and partnerships. She declined to say how many Kenyans had asked the government about the fate of relatives in Russia, or how many Kenyans had been killed in Ukraine. “They are being recruited by rogue agencies,” she said.
Although some conscripts reported receiving salaries, most said their bank accounts were raided or frozen by recruiters. Many families said their loved ones simply went silent. A single WhatsApp group for relatives of missing Kenyans has nearly 100 members. Some have already had their worst fears confirmed.
Kenyan Grace Gathoni, 38, said her husband and the father of their four children, Martin Macharia, left for Russia on Oct. 21 after being promised a job as a driver or a cleaner. He was forced to sign a contract he didn’t understand, she said, and deployed to Ukraine.
When they last spoke on Nov. 19, she said, Macharia asked for her prayers. A week later, she saw his body on a Kenyan news bulletin.
Her 4-year-old keeps asking when he will return home, she said. The older ones know he’s not coming back.
The recruiters
Kenya, a longtime U.S. security partner in East Africa, is not growing fast enough to provide jobs for its population of 53 million. Young people struggle to find steady work; underfunded public schools and hospitals often lack staff and resources. Political graft is rampant.
President WilliamRuto has made exporting labor a central plank of his economic strategy, promising to send a million people abroad to work. Labor Minister Alfred Mutua visited Russia in June to highlight Kenyans who had found jobs there through an agency. Kenya’s prime cabinet secretary, Musalia Mudavadi, said in December that the two countries are discussing a labor treaty.
But The Post identified five Kenyan companies ostensibly recruiting for civilian jobs in Russia that instead funneled men to the front lines in Ukraine. Most prominent among them was Global Face, run by businessman Festus Omwamba, whom multiple families identified by name. Gichuhi, the diaspora welfare secretary, said most recruiters had been arrested and Global Face de-registered, although Omwamba was still at large.
Families also pointed to Edward Gituku, an associate of Omwamba who was arrested on human trafficking charges in September after 22 Kenyan men were detained while preparing to travel to Russia. Lawyer Danstan Omari, who initially represented Gituku, told The Post that his former client had admitted to sending more than 1,000 men to Russia, many of whom subsequently served in the military.
Eight Kenyans said they or their relatives had gone to Russia through Global Face, providing phone numbers registered to Omwamba, Gituku or other agency employees — and, in many cases, proof of payment to the recruiters. All said they were lured by the promise of civilian jobs, except for one man, a former Kenyan military recruit who said he knew he was being sent to fight.
The Post attempted to contact Gituku and Omwamba using numbers shared by families but was unable to reach them for comment. Global Face did not respond to emails seeking comment and appeared to have no physical offices in Kenya.
In April, Omwamba arranged for Oscar Khagola Mutoka, a 39-year-old veteran of Kenya’s U.S.-trained Ranger unit, and another local man to leave for Russia, according to Peter Shitanda Malalu, Mutoka’s cousin. Mutoka’s family last heard from him in June but kept sending messages; in January, they finally received a response from his phone. It was in Russian, from his former commander, saying he had been killed in August.
The message said “if we wanted the body, we can find it at the morgue in Rostov,” Malalu said. “We do not know if he was ever paid, but our family never received anything.”
The family shared that and other messages from the commander, including one in which he said that “compensation for the death of a soldier is granted to relatives who have citizenship of the Russian Federation” and in which he offered to bring Oscar’s body to Moscow’s airport. From there, he said, the family would be responsible for transportation costs.
In September, as Mutoka’s sister tried to trace him, she contacted a number registered to Omwamba. She received a reply saying he was in Russia and would follow up on Mutoka’s whereabouts, according to a voice note she shared with The Post. The last message from Omwamba’s number in January brushed off the family’s increasingly urgent pleas: “I do not want to be involved in your gossip,” he wrote on WhatsApp.
Another Kenyan woman, Risper Aoko Ouma, said her 39-year-old husband had flown to Russia in July on a flight arranged by Omwamba. A military veteran of 14 years, Duncan Otieno Juma was wounded almost immediately that month in a Ukrainian drone attack that killed another Kenyan and many other Africans, she said. He was then sent back to the front lines. She said she has not heard from him since August. When she asked a Global Face employee for news of her husband, she received a demand for money.
“How much are you ready to pay me?” the employee asked in a text message viewed by The Post.
More than a dozen African men were killed in October in the Kupyansk area of eastern Ukraine, Volodymyr Dehtyarov, a Ukrainian military public affairs officer, told The Post. Among the dead was a Kenyan man, whose passport he provided. The man’s family confirmed he had gone to Russia in September. They never heard from him again.
Kenyans are still making the journey, despite a growing awareness of their likely fate. A man who considered going to Russia but ultimately decided against it said two of his friends left on Dec. 27; immigration agents are watching out for men traveling to Moscow, he said, but it only means you have to pay an extra bribe.
The contract
One of the Kenyan recruits who made it back from Ukraine, a 32-year-old whose silver tooth flashed in a confident smile, now wears black gloves to hide the burns on his hands and a wool hat pulled low over burn scars on the back of his head. He said he paid Omwamba’s company and his employees a total of $390 for a civilian job in Russia.
Before he left, he said, he underwent a physical and met a man who identified himself as a member of the Russian Embassy in Nairobi. They gave him a contract in Russian to sign but refused to give him a copy, he said. He was told he’d be paid $2,650 per month for frontline work, $2,150 for a rear position away from the fighting and $885 for working back in Russia — still a small fortune in Kenya.
In August, he flew to St. Petersburg with three other civilians, all of whom were told they would work as security guards, and three former Kenyan soldiers. Despite having tourist visas, he said, they were taken by handlers to open accounts at Bank Saint-Petersburg, which is subject to U.S. sanctions. Then they were presented with new contracts — all offering frontline rates. None of them, he said, were given the option to stay in Russia.
“We said we need to translate this document, and we will sign it when we are satisfied,” the man recalled telling the Russian agent, but he was told there was no time. The men could either sign the frontline contract, the agent said, or repay the money they had spent to travel there.
“That’s what forced us to sign,” the recruit said.
A former member of Kenya’s armed forces now employed in the security sector said Omwamba’s company has recruited more than 50 military veterans whom he knew personally, including at least two who were working for a security company in the Middle East. Many had been killed, he said, citing accounts from his Kenyan contacts in Russia.
One recruit’s mother said he was a former military police officer who was working as a guard at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq when he was recruited by Russia. “He was my only son,” she said, showing a picture of a muscular man smiling on a beach. She paid nearly $3,900 to the recruiters to try to get him back, she said, but they took the money and he never came home. She doesn’t know if he’s alive.
Another person in the Kenyan security industry said he knew at least 32 active members of the military who had deserted to head to Russia. A woman said her 37-year-old brother, previously an inspector in the general service unit of the Kenyan police, had also made the trip, not realizing he was being recruited by the army. He sent an email upon arriving asking her to download a secure app so they could speak.
“He was in hiding,” she said. He was trying to escape, he told her. She never heard another word from him.
Michael Muchiri, a spokesman for Kenya’s police, told The Post that a key recruiter was arrested last year and that no serving officers had gone to Russia. The Kenyan militarydid not respond to requests for comment.
Sent to die
The 32-year-old recruit, along with 16 other Kenyans, a Guinean and several Cameroonians, undertook two weeks of training in shooting, navigation and fitness in Russian-occupied Ukraine, he said.
“We were told: ‘You are our machinery; you have to work like machines. … You must fight,’” he said. A fellow Kenyan nicknamed Mwas told him new conscripts all went in the same direction — “to the front line.” Mwas was killed shortly after they spoke, he said.
The man was among six Kenyans sent to fight; another six refused but eventually relented after they were threatened with arrest, he said.
On Sept. 16, his first day in combat, the 32-year-old, another Kenyan and three Russians were ordered to run across open ground to a forest. The area was mined, he said, and there were explosions. Their Russian guide shot at drones overhead and showed them how to navigate from dugout to dugout, he recalled, but the Kenyan began to lose his nerve when they came across a couple of Russian soldiers bleeding badly.
During their last sprint, he said, a drone fired explosives and bullets at them. The blast knocked him over and his backpack, stuck over his head, caught fire. One of the Russian soldiers was killed.
He was taken to a field hospital packed with wounded men, where he stayed for a week before being transferred by train to a hospital near St. Petersburg, he said. When doctors told him he was well enough to return to the front lines, he said, he hatched an escape plan. He asked that details not be divulged, as other injured soldiers might need similar contacts to get out, but he shared documents — including his medical report, Russian visa and a Russian military ID — to support his account. Before leaving the country, he managed to access his new bank account and withdraw about $5,000 from his promised signing bonus of $25,000.
At least, he said, he hadn’t come home empty-handed.
A 27-year-old Kenyan relayed a similar story: payments to Global Face staff, the offer of a civilian job and being taken by an agent to open a bank account after arriving in Russia. He had to sign a standing order giving the agency access to his account, he said. Later, when he tried to withdraw his money after being wounded, he was told his account was blocked. He provided a bank card, Russian military ID, medical records, photographs and other papers to support his account.
“The commanders said: ‘We have paid 1.5 million rubles to bring you here, so you’re in our hands,’” he said.
During his training in Rostov, he met about 30 other Kenyans, including a police officer from a paramilitary unit and a former soldier from the elite U.S.-trained long-range surveillance squad, he said — as well as men from Togo, Nigeria and Malawi.
“The trainers didn’t speak English. They just showed you how to shoot a gun,” he said.
In Ukraine, his group of 27 included five Kenyans, he said. They were ordered to sprint across open ground and cross two rivers, one swollen with bodies. Only he and another Kenyan survived the onslaught of Ukrainian drones, he said.
The recruit had injuries to his hands; the other man was wounded in the leg. They came across an injured radio operator, who messaged for help. None came. They spent another two days limping back to a Russian base.
The man said he was hospitalized with eight other wounded Kenyans, some South Africans and a Cameroonian. One had lost part of an arm; two had lost their legs.
“One man with no legs asked if he could go home,” he said, “and was told, ‘When your contract ends.’”
He escaped from the hospital, and then from Russia, he said. Since returning home, he has struggled to find work.
A third man who traveled to Russia in August said he and another Kenyan were given weapons but no training and ordered to carry heavy backpacks of rations to frontline positions in a Ukrainian forest.
When they reached the forward operating base, they were told to rest, the man said, then abandoned by the Russian soldiers they had resupplied. With no water, they drank from a river filled with corpses.
Contemporary listeners of Kino’s hit album Blood Type (1988) would have had no trouble identifying the war alluded to in the title track: the Soviet-Afghan War was still ongoing. The war was one of the causes of the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse in 1991. Unless it is stopped in short order, the Trump regime’s just-as-needless war against U.S. cities will lead to the collapse of the United States. ||||| TRR
The Soviet–Afghan War took place in Afghanistan from December 1979 to February 1989. Marking the beginning of the 47-year-long Afghan conflict, it saw the Soviet Union and the Afghan military fight against the rebelling Afghan mujahideen, aided by Pakistan. While they were backed by various countries and organizations, the majority of the mujahideen’s support came from Pakistan, the United States (as part of Operation Cyclone), the United Kingdom, China, Iran, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, in addition to a large influx of foreign fighters known as the Afghan Arabs. American and British involvement on the side of the mujahideen escalated the Cold War, ending a short period of relaxed Soviet Union–United States relations.
Combat took place throughout the 1980s, mostly in the Afghan countryside, as most of the country’s cities remained under Soviet control. The conflict resulted in the deaths of one to three million Afghans, while millions more fled from the country as refugees; most externally displaced Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan and in Iran. Between 6.5 and 11.5% of Afghanistan’s population of 13.5 million people (per the 1979 census) is estimated to have been killed over the course of the Soviet–Afghan War. The decade-long confrontation between the mujahideen and the Soviet and Afghan militaries inflicted grave destruction throughout Afghanistan, and has been cited by scholars as a significant factor contributing to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; it is for this reason that the conflict is sometimes referred to as “the Soviet Union’s Vietnam”.
Source: Wikipedia. The emphasis, in the last paragraph, is mine. ||||| TRR
[…]
The pretext for this war, of course, has always been a bogus premise. Yet federal agents treat it with the dogma of settled fact. But I keep wondering: How does the average CBP or ICE agent convince themselves of this? Even now, I can’t help shake the absurdity of anyone—Trump, Gregory Bovino, whomever—hoping to convince a thinking person, even themselves, to believe that places like Minneapolis have ever required an armed occupation. It’s against this genuine perplexity that I keep coming back to how these officers look and what mirrors might reflect back to them when they dress up for war.
“Anybody who’s had a fun evening on Halloween can understand what happens when somebody fully dresses up in paramilitary gear with flash-bang grenades hanging off of them,” said Peter Kraska, a justice studies professor at Eastern Kentucky University. “They’re going to walk out in public and say to themselves, ‘I am different from all these people.’ They become the enforcer. And when they look out and see the other, they see an enemy. The [paramilitary gear] gets them to react differently and think differently than they normally would.”
The role of military-style uniforms in helping the Trump administration create a theater of war where none exists cannot be overstated. It marks a stark evolution from the early days of Trump’s mass deportation plans, when plainclothed agents looked a lot like your best friend’s worst boyfriend—the guy who moved to rural Pennsylvania and discovered the basement levels of gun culture. Now, agents march into town in the costume of a foreign invasion.
Consider the camouflage now ubiquitous across the cities ICE occupies. At first, the pattern’s technical science might seem like a natural extension of the Trump administration’s increasingly illegal efforts to shield the identities of the men carrying out its vision of cruelty. But the theory breaks down when you look at the urban landscapes where ICE hunts down immigrants. Simply put, wearing camo in places like Lake Street or Hyde Park defies its central aim. If camo’s built-in purpose is to avoid detection, ICE’s embrace of it is the opposite: They want maximum visibility. They want to show they are soldiers. And they want to do so to make it seem reasonable, if only to themselves, to act like an invading army.
When I reached out to the Department of Homeland Security about the use of military gear among ICE agents, spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin responded with her own question: “Why do ICE agents wear tactical gear when they are facing rampant assaults and vehicular attacks? Is that the question you’re asking?” No, not really. But the snark with which McLaughlin replied was enough to grasp that questioning why DHS employs camo when lush woodlands do not exist in the cities its agents invade was irrelevant. They are dressing for the war they want.
What other way was there to interpret the coat of the former envoy of terror, Bovino? The commentariat spent much time deliberating its lineage, whether or not Bovino’s hulking olive garb was in fact true Nazi wear. (It turns out it was not.) But in roaming around Minneapolis in the fashions of Hugo Boss circa 1933, Bovino, who reportedly travels with his own film crew, succeeded in pushing the optics of war where it does not exist.
“What you’re seeing is the functionality of gear for legitimate, militarized purposes versus a type of postmodern, performative imagery,” Kraska said. “It makes them feel a particular way, to tap into those warrior fantasies and masculine drive of, ‘I’m a real man, I’m a real badass.’”
Federal agents stand outside the Whipple Federal Building in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on 8 January 2026. Photo: Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty/Mother Jones
The same holds for the men under Bovino. These are federal agents who wear hats intended for jungle warfare—again, in Minneapolis, where no such jungle exists—as well as blood-type patches, despite little evidence that they would ever be needed. After all, they are in Minneapolis, an American city with American hospitals, where doctors provide blood transfusions without the help of uniform instructions, the way a soldier on a remote battlefield might actually need. Furthermore, ICE’s own data strongly undercuts the notion that the job of an ICE officer is even uniquely dangerous work. In the absence of peril, federal agents turn to costume to legitimize their presence.
I am heating water for my coffee on a gas burner because there is no electricity.
Kyiv, the Kyiv region, Odesa region, and the Dnipropetrovsk region are in a total blackout — the result of Russia systematically destroying Ukraine’s energy system over the past months.
The Kyiv metro has stopped. There is no water anywhere.
At the same time, Russia’s State Duma Speaker Volodin, speaking on behalf of Russian deputies, openly calls for genocide — urging new strikes on Ukraine’s already devastated energy and heating infrastructure in order to cause mass civilian deaths.
This weekend the temperature drops sharply. Next week, it is expected to reach –30°C.
Meanwhile, ordinary Russians are celebrating on social media that Ukrainians are freezing.
We know this logic well. Their aspiration is simple: to make life here “like it is for them.”
In Russia, even without war, power outages in entire regions are normal.
In a gas-rich country, it is normal for many regions to have no gas at all.
This is exactly what the so-called Russian world aims for — to make us like them, if not through conquest, then through the destruction of our critical infrastructure and the physical extermination of Ukrainians.
The number of children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention on a given day has skyrocketed, jumping more than sixfold since the start of the second Trump administration. The Marshall Project analyzed data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and found that ICE held around 170 children on an average day under Trump. During the last 16 months of the Biden administration, ICE held around 25 children a day.
The Marshall Project’s analysis found that on some days, ICE held 400 children or more. The data covers September 2023 to mid-October 2025, meaning it does not include the surge of arrests from recent immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota. Nor does the data include children in the custody of the Border Patrol or the Office of Refugee Resettlement, where children are held without a guardian.
The Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas is the main facility for family detention. U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro spent two-and-a-half hours inside Dilley on Wednesday, visiting parents and children. He said that the 1,100 detainees housed at the facility included a 2-month-old infant. “They are literally being treated as prisoners,” said Castro, a Democrat from San Antonio, in a live-streamed video. “This is a monstrous machine.”
In 2021, Biden largely halted the practice of family detention, and the Dilley facility, which had mostly housed families, closed in 2024. But the Trump administration revived the practice last year, and the facility, which is located about 75 miles outside of San Antonio, reopened.
The detainment of children by ICE has led to protests in recent weeks, both inside and outside Dilley. On Wednesday, state police used pepper spray on people protesting outside.
Immigration attorney Eric Lee was visiting clients at the facility on Saturday when staff abruptly told him to leave. Outside, he could hear a large group of children and women detained inside chanting, “Let us out.” Lee said he later learned that families inside the detention center had gotten news that people across the country were protesting the detainment of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, whose story went viral amid the backlash against the Trump administration’s recent immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota.
Javier Hidalgo, legal director at the Texas-based immigration advocacy group RAICES said he’s seen many young children like Liam in Dilley. “That’s very much the norm,” Hidalgo said. “That’s what the government is spending taxpayer money on.”
“Every single day that a kid is in a place like this, they deteriorate,” Hidalgo said. “I’ve seen [them] withdraw. They lose weight; they just get physically worse.”
Children being detained with their families as part of immigration raids has become a common occurrence across the country. According to school officials in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, four children, including Liam, have been detained from their district during recent raids.
A 7-year-old in Portland, Oregon, was taken from a hospital parking lot in January with her family, after her parents took her to the emergency room, according to Oregon Live. As ProPublica reported, a 6-year-old boy in Chicago was detained with his mother in a large apartment raid during “Operation Midway Blitz.”
The Marshall Project spoke with three different lawyers representing children who were held with their families at Dilley. They said their clients were often taken into detention during in-person check-ins and had pending cases that could result in them remaining in the country legally. The lawyers believe their clients were detained not because of any danger they posed, but because the Trump administration is trying to deport as many people as possible.
“They’re probably the easiest catch for a lot of immigration officials,” said Veronica Franco Salazar, a Houston-based immigration lawyer.
In court documents, families have described horrific conditions while detained with their children in Dilley. They reported moldy, worm-filled food and foul-tasting, undrinkable water. With little for children to do, some resorted to playing with rocks. Parents worried about the psychological toll of detention, describing children hitting themselves in their faces or wetting themselves despite being potty-trained.
During his visit, Castro said that he heard many families talk about the psychological toll of detention. He spent half an hour with Liam, and said Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, told him Liam has been depressed and sleeping a lot. Liam remained asleep in his father’s arms during the visit with Castro. Arias said Liam had been asking about his classmates and the bunny hat he was wearing when detained. The congressman said he told the father that children at Liam’s school were still saving a spot for him at his desk.
CoreCivic, the private company running the Dilley facility, declined to answer a detailed list of questions. “Our responsibility is to care for each person respectfully and humanely while they receive the legal due process that they are entitled to,” Brian Todd, a public affairs employee at CoreCivic, told The Marshall Project in an emailed statement. Todd referred all questions to ICE, which did not respond to emails.
Kristin Kumpf, coordinator for the National Coalition to End Family and Child Detention, explained that the public may see videos or photos of the moments people are taken from their homes or snatched off the street, but there is less attention to the conditions children endure in the black box of detention.
“It’s only a matter of time before we see a child die within Dilley or another facility,” Kumpf said.
Hayam El-Gamal and her five children, including 5-year-old twins, have been locked inside Dilley for eight grueling months. Lee, who represents the family, said they’ve received poor medical care and are suffering from psychological stress.
“They’re calling me crying every day,” Lee said. “It’s an unmitigated horror show, and there’s no other way to put it.”
El-Gamal’s husband, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, is facing charges for attacking people at an event in Colorado supporting Israeli hostages in Gaza. At least 13 people were injured in the attack, and one person died, according to prosecutors. Soliman told detectives his family knew nothing of the attack, according to court documents, and an FBI agent testified they were not involved. The family’s lawyer said they are being unfairly punished for crimes they had no part in.
Lee recounted how one of El-Gamal’s children had appendicitis while in detention and “was left writhing on the floor of the facility screaming and in pain.” Lee said facility staff just gave him Tylenol, and it was only when he started vomiting that the child was taken to urgent care.
“Why is this happening to us?” El-Gamal’s eldest daughter, 18-year-old Habiba Soliman, asked in a handwritten statement provided to The Marshall Project by Lee. “It’s very easy to see the truth about this place and about us. The people need to be truthful to themselves and follow the facts.”
Lee said he believes ICE is retaliating against Habiba Soliman for speaking out about her family’s long detention. She was recently moved to a different area of the facility. Lee said the timing of the move, many months after her 18th birthday, but shortly after she spoke to the press about her long detainment, suggested it was punishment. ICE did not respond to questions about the reason for the separation. Lee said she has faced threats of being moved to a different facility altogether if she didn’t behave.
“I will never forget the look of fear and helplessness on my mother’s face as she watched me being taken away and couldn’t do anything to prevent it,” Habiba Soliman wrote in her statement. “We need everyone to step up and say that detaining families for indefinitely long periods should be illegal.”
In this gripping tale of contemporary Russia, a young filmmaker and her friends run afoul of a government that ruthlessly oppresses artists who dare to satirize the regime…
When Maya, a young Russian filmmaker, makes a low-budget horror movie with her friends, it seems like a promising start to a career in indie film. Little does she know that her jokey lo-fi film will soon attract the attention of the autocratic censors at the highest levels of the Russian police state.
What follows is a propulsive narrative of an artist being crushed by state power, and the choices that one makes within a system where free expression is literally illegal. Written with the undeniable voice of a emigre from Putin’s Russia, The Undead is a tense, piercing story that serves as a parable, and a warning, about political oppression.
Contributors
Svetlana Satchkova is a Russian-born journalist and writer who immigrated to the United States in 2016. She is an established arts journalist with bylines in the Rumpus, Newsweek, LARB, and others. She is currently a research fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University, has an MFA from Brooklyn College, and lives in Brooklyn. The Undead is her first novel in English.
Praise
“[An] exquisite balance between contentment and foreboding, tranquility and chaos” — Vogue
“Chillingly examines the Russian government’s stranglehold on the arts and media industries …. a convincing cautionary tale of the dangers of political apathy.” —Publishers Weekly
“[A] brisk, vivid page turner” — The Milwaukee Shepherd Express
“There is nothing supernatural about the zombies in Svetlana Satchkova’s savvy, frightening novel. They are all of us, wherever we are, who keep looking away when authoritarian forces crush expression. Witty and unsettling, The Undead is a cautionary tale about, among other things, never quite admitting where the danger lies until it’s too late.” —Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask
“The Undead is a courageous and witty book about art and politics. With keen insight and wry humor, Svetlana Satchkova evokes a devastating artistic and moral reckoning. This fascinating, propulsive novel will stay with me.” —Helen Phillips, author of The Need
“The Undead has the force of an undertow, pulling us relentlessly away from safety. Svetlana Satchkova has written a gripping, haunting portrait of a world coming undone.” —Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
In The Undead, the career and well-being of Maya, a young filmmaker in Moscow, unravel in the most bizarre, realistic way, showcasing the insidious, absurd nature of a totalitarian state. Deeply informative and engrossing, The Undead examines how bizarre and horrific human nature can evolve under the pressure of the desire to live unharmed rather than free. A moving examination of the meaning of home, the horror of a dictatorship, the hilarity and joy of movie-making, and one woman’s political coming of age in Putin’s Russia. Truly important reading for our times.” —Paula Bomer, author of The Stalker
Glintshake, “Have a Heart” • Erarta Museum, St. Petersburg, 2 April 2017 • Source: Denis Morozov (YouTube)
[Verse 1] Beyond the bright lights Of sleepy buildings Lines in the snow Send signals From distant stations Docks are waiting Waiting in the fog For distant shores In the haze of summer In the arctic circle
[Chorus] Have a heart
[Verse 2] A gusty wind Noise on the line The compactor gently crushes the white Volga, waves splash The markings are washed away The airfield is not visible in the fog, the camera clicks The speed drops The waves crash The earliest The most distant flight Faces and shadows Of random passersby
[Bridge] In dark apartments In yellow deserts In blue snows In fiery rivers In the foggy sea
[Chorus] Have a heart
[Outro] Salt on the dials The needle flutters The airfield is invisible in the fog, the camera clicks Step on the gas! In the endless field, in the pink jungle, in the summer haze Have a heart
[Verse 1] Headlights, I see a shadow Someone’s been hanging around for days Standing around the corner Lying on the grass under the window A bloodsucker Or the corner Loading His black barrel His black barrel His black barrel His black barrel
Who is he, a skinner Or a TV reporter A maniac, a Satanist Or a Russian Orthodox Stalinist I hear the wind An ominous moan The pungent scent Of pouring cologne
[Chorus] A halfman Roams Moscow A halfman In a half-jacket
[Verse 2] Strolls in places Where everything is sold without a passport Zhiguli cars are burning We gotta move before they sweep us away Gritting my teeth I dance In a techno club Four days
When I grow up I’ll stop thinking and understand everything The light of faith will dispel the darkness My same-sex marriage will fall apart I’ll go out into the world I’ll throw away my syringe I’ll become the best Of all the shop girls
[Chorus] A halfman Roams Moscow A halfman Not in his right mind
In my days as a magazine editor in Russia, I used to write about movies Volodymyr Zelensky starred in. I thought of him as a decent actor and a nice enough person. Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen him turn into a towering historical figure. Watching his impassioned address to the UN Security Council, in which he spoke about war crimes committed by Russian troops in a town of Bucha, I caught myself thinking that I want Russia’s next leader to be just like him – courageous, principled, and boundlessly empathetic.
In the fall of 1993, I began my first semester at NYU. Just one year earlier, I’d been a regular Moscow teenager, whose wildest ambition was to own a nice pair of jeans. But my father had been offered a job at an American company, and our family relocated to New York. With the move, the world suddenly opened to me, possibilities beckoning. My father, ever the practical man, told me to study business. Ever the obedient Soviet child, I didn’t protest, despite the fact that nothing could interest me less — but fortunately for me, there was no such thing as a business major at NYU, and, when I got my BA in philosophy, I moved back to Russia, leaving my parents and younger brother behind. The fact that I did so was testament to how profoundly I’d changed in four years.
I was barely 20, but my reasons for returning were clear. I’d fallen in love with a man who lived in Moscow, and I longed for the glorious city which I still considered to be my home. In 1997, Moscow was an exciting place where everything was changing at an incredible pace. New lives were being built on top of the remnants of the USSR. I also felt drawn to Russian intellectual culture, having started writing my first novel in Russian, and I wanted my child, whom I was already carrying, to speak my native language as fluently as I did.
My marriage to the father of my son didn’t work out, as was perhaps expected of a union between people so young. But I was busy becoming who I wanted to be — a writer and a mother — and quickly bounced back. Meanwhile, Russia continued to change. In August 1999, I saw Vladimir Putin on television for the very first time, introduced as the new prime minister. I’ve never been particularly politically astute, but at that moment, I saw in his face, as in a crystal ball, what was going to happen in the years to come: the scheming, the corruption, the crackdown on independent media, the police state.
In September of that same year, a series of explosions destroyed several apartment blocks in the cities of Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk; over 300 people died and 1700 were injured. I remember watching the news late at night, my two-year-old son asleep in the next room, and trembling in fear as I wondered if my building would be next. I imagined the most horrible thing – not that we’d both be dead, but dying, separated by fallen walls, him calling me, pleading for help. In a few days, rumors abounded that it was Putin who’d ordered the explosions with the aim of blaming them on Chechen militant Islamists. He became president in 2000, after starting the second war in Chechnya and famously having promised to “snuff ‘em in the outhouse,” to the delight of the majority of the population of Russia.
Had I believed my initial premonition, I would’ve left right away, but I liked to think of myself as a rational person. And so I tried to convince myself that I was being paranoid. It wasn’t easy.
Over the next ten years, Putin’s regime took away people’s freedoms in tiny steps that were probably meant to be unnoticeable, while he gathered enough power for himself that he could change the constitution and effectively be president indefinitely. Meanwhile, I built up my Moscow life. I was a writer, but I was also a single mother whose relatives lived across the ocean, and I worried about what would happen to my son if anything happened to me. So, though I wanted to report on the shrinking of democracy, I wrote instead about beauty and culture. In this way, I thought, I’d protect myself from the dangers of those who covered nationalist movements and wars. I wouldn’t end up dead, like Anna Politkovskaya and countless others.
But self-preservation under a regime like Putin’s can only take you so far. In 2014, when the people of Ukraine ousted their pro-Russia president Victor Yanukovych from his office, Putin swiftly moved into the neighboring country and annexed the Crimean Peninsula. Russian society split into two opposing camps, one cheering Putin’s maneuver and the other incensed by it. The question “Who does Crimea belong to?” became the most salient marker of “them” versus “us.” Marriages crumbled under the weight of this question; friendships were irreparably broken; people became estranged from their parents. Later that year, a provision to the criminal law obligated all dual nationals to report to the authorities. I made a copy of my American passport, filled out the requisite forms, and went to my local branch of the Federal Migration Service. The man who inspected my documents had the unmistakable air of someone who was embroiled in Russian state bureaucracy, at once condescending and menacing. He made it exceedingly clear what he thought of the likes of me, and when I came home that evening, I told my partner that, finally, I wanted to leave Russia for good.
It took us another two years to make the move, and we arrived in the United States in 2016. I began writing fiction in English and continued to work for Russian media outlets that didn’t support Putin’s regime. Still, I was careful not to write about politics, knowing that, if I went back to Moscow, I could face prosecution. Everything changed this February, however: Putin’s invasion into Ukraine — a country that I’d visited often and love, a country where many of my friends hail from — made it impossible for me to keep silent. I need to say publicly that this war is abhorrent and that Russians do not equal Putin –– even those of us who, like me, have been afraid to speak out in the past.
I do realize that I’m able to take this risk because I’m in New York, protected by my American passport. A law has been passed in Russia that prohibits its citizens from using the word “war” to refer to the “special operation” that’s taking place in Ukraine, and effectively prevents them from saying they’re against it under the threat of imprisonment. My heart goes out to all the people back home who feel the same way I do. I know that there are many of them and that they are experiencing crushing guilt for failing to somehow stop Putin, the president they didn’t elect. And while we’ll agonize for a long time over the question of what more each of us could have done, it’s beyond clear that peaceful protests don’t stand a chance against Putin’s weapons and his complete disregard for human life.
Source: Svetlana Satchkova, “I’m Russian and I stayed quiet about Putin for a long time. This is what I really think,” The Independent, 11 April 2022. The emphasis is mine.||||| TRR
Yuri Dmitriev is a historian and researcher of Stalinist repressions in Karelia, in the North of Russia, and one of the first political prisoners of the new repressive era in Russia. He searched for the sites of mass executions in 1937–1938 and worked to restore the fates of people who were shot during the Great Terror and died in the Gulag camps. He recognised the terrible nature of the new Russian regime sooner than others did, and spoke openly about it. The conviction of Yuri Dmitriev is an example of the Putin regime’s direct inheritance of the spirit and logic of Stalinist terror.
Since December 2016, Dmitriev has been persecuted on false charges.He has been imprisoned for nine years. His sentence is 15 years.He will turn 70 on January 28, 2026.
For the past four years, the historian has been held in a harsh regime penal colony in Mordovia, central Russia. During his time there, he has been placed in solitary confinement nine times. His health is now in critical condition. We want to raise money to give Yuri Dmitriev and his family a gift for his anniversary. These funds will be used to cover his daily expenses in the colony (purchasing food and necessary items), regular visits from his lawyer, and parcels. This is the least we can do to thank Yuri Dmitriev for his work to restore the memory of the victims of Stalin’s terror and for his uncompromising stance towards the crimes of the present.
Iouri Dmitriev est un historien et un chercheur spécialiste des répressions staliniennes en Carélie, dans le nord de la Russie. Il compte parmi les premiers prisonniers politiques de la nouvelle ère répressive instaurée en Russie. Pendant des décennies, il a recherché les lieux d’exécutions massives de 1937–1938 et s’est attaché à rétablir l’identité et le destin des personnes fusillées durant la Grande Terreur ou mortes dans les camps du Goulag. Très tôt, il a compris et dénoncé publiquement la dérive autoritaire du régime russe contemporain.
La condamnation d’Iouri Dmitriev incarne, de manière tragiquement exemplaire, la continuité entre la logique répressive actuelle et l’héritage de la terreur stalinienne.
Depuis décembre 2016, il est la cible de persécutions fondées sur des accusations fabriquées de toutes pièces. Incarcéré depuis neuf ans, il purge aujourd’hui une peine de quinze années de prison. Il aura 70 ans le 28 janvier 2026.
Depuis quatre ans, Iouri Dmitriev est détenu dans une colonie pénitentiaire à régime sévère en Mordovie, dans le centre de la Russie. Durant cette période, il a été placé à neuf reprises à l’isolement. Son état de santé est désormais extrêmement préoccupant.
Nous souhaitons organiser une collecte afin d’offrir à Iouri Dmitriev et à sa famille un présent pour son anniversaire. Les fonds permettront de couvrir ses dépenses quotidiennes dans la colonie pénitentière (achats alimentaires et produits de première nécessité), les visites régulières de son avocat ainsi que l’envoi de colis.
C’est le minimum que nous puissions faire pour exprimer notre gratitude envers Iouri Dmitriev, pour son travail inlassable de restauration de la mémoire des victimes de la terreur stalinienne et pour sa position sans compromis face aux crimes perpétrés aujourd’hui.
Юрий Дмитриев – историк, исследователь сталинских репрессий в Карелии, на Севере России, один из первых политических заключенных новой репрессивной эпохи в России. Он занимался поиском мест массовых убийств 1937–1938 годов, восстановлением судеб людей, расстрелянных в период Большого террора и умерших в лагерях ГУЛАГа. Он раньше других понял страшную природу новой российской власти и открыто говорил о ней. Осуждение Юрия Дмитриева – пример, проявляющий прямое наследование путинским режимом духа и логики сталинского террора.
С декабря 2016 г. Дмитриева преследуют по лживым обвинениям. Он находится в неволе уже 9 лет. Срок заключения по приговору – 15 лет. 28 января 2026 года ему исполнится 70 лет.
Последние четыре года историк находится в колонии строгого режима в Мордовии в Центральной России. За время своего пребывания там он девять раз сидел в штрафном изоляторе. Его здоровье сейчас в критическом состоянии. Мы хотим собрать денег, чтобы сделать подарок к юбилею Юрия Дмитриева ему и его семье. Эти средства будут потрачены на его ежедневные расходы в колонии (покупку еды и необходимых вещей), регулярные визиты адвоката, посылки. Это то немногое, что мы можем сделать в благодарность Юрию Дмитриеву за его работу по восстановлению памяти о жертвах сталинского террора и за его непримиримость по отношению к преступлениям настоящего.
Source: Memorial France (Helloasso). Thanks to Jessica Gorter for the heads-up. It took me a minute or two to fill out the form to donate money to this fundraiser, and I would urge you to donate as well by clicking on any of the five links (above) in this post. To read my years-long coverage of the Dmitriev Case, go here. ||||| TRR
