Day: November 9, 2017

Dmitry Buchenkov, Last Bolotnaya Square Defendant, Flees Russia

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Last Bolotnaya Square Defendant Flees Russia
RBC
November 9, 2017

In an interview with Current Time TV, Bolotnaya Square defendant Dmitry Buchenkov said he has left Russia for a European Union country.

He said he has applied for political asylum in this country. Buchenkov failed to say exactly where he had gone.

“I’m calm about the fact I won’t be returning to the motherland soon. I won’t say leaving was easy. Psychologically, of course, I didn’t want to leave,” he noted. “The regime and the entire justice system forced me to take this step.”

He added he was currently not in touch with relatives.

When asked how he managed to cross the Russian border, the Bolotnaya Square defendant said he was “neither the first nor the last person to do it in such circumstances.”

According to Buchenkov, the Bolotnaya Square Case was “political” from the onset. He said that, after he was put under house arrest, “for six months [he] observed how the case was unfolding personally for [him]” and was convinced a guilty verdict lay in store. He said he was transferred from a pretrial detention facility to house arrest during a “brief thaw.” He was not outfitted with an electronic tracking bracelet, because the Naro-Fominsky division of the Federal Penitentiary Service had run out of them.

“I think the police investigators have long known they nabbed the wrong guy. But it was too late for them to back out,” said Buchenkov.

On the morning of November 9, Buchenkov did not show up to the Zamoskvorechye District Court for the latest hearing in his case, in which he stood accused of involvement in rioting. The Federal Penitentiary Service has accused him of fleeing, writes Current Time. Federal Penitentiary Service spokeswoman Natalya Bakharina said the defendant had “absconded,” since he was not to be found in his flat. She noted another family had been living there since November 5, and they were given keys to the flat in late October.

Buchenkov’s attorney Ilya Novikov wrote that he would refrain from commenting for the time being. In turn, Buchenkov’s other attorney, Svetlana Sidorkina, told RBC she did not know about her client’s departure from Russia.

“I don’t know about it. I do know he did not come to today’s hearing, during which the matter of whether to continue the forensic investigation or not was to have been ajudicated,” said Sidorkina.

According to her, the court decided to postpone the hearing since Buchenkov was not in attendance.

In April, at a hearing in the Zamoskvorechye District Court, Buchenkov declared himself not guilty of involvement in rioting and fighting with policemen. He was accused of violence against six Interiory Ministry officers and causing damage in the amount of 73,800 rubles to a commercial firm that set up porta-potties near Bolotnaya Square in Moscow.

Buchenkov, a 38-year-old anarchist and history teacher, was detained and remanded to custody in December 2015, thus becoming the thirty-fourth defendant in the Bolotnaya Square Case. Later, the Moscow City Court released him from custody and put him under house arrest. Buchenkov’s lawyers insisted the activist was not in Moscow during the events of May 6, 2012. The claim was corroborated by Buchenkov’s relatives in Nizhny Novgorod.

According to the defense, the police investigators who, allegedly, identified Buchenkov on video recordings of the May 6, 2012, protest rally mixed him up with another person. The defense lawyers sought to enter higher resolution photographs into evidence, but police investigators refused to take them into account.

Translated by the Russian Reader

Astroturf on Ice

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Washington Capitals star player Alexei Ovechkin. Photo courtesy of A. Gordeyev/Vedomosti

Alexander Ovechkin’s Movement Could Be Part of Putin’s Election Campaign 
Svetlana Bocharova
Vedomosti
November 9, 2017

Putin Team, a movement launched last week by Washington Capitals hockey star Alexander Ovechkin, is meant to unite celebrities and could be part of the campaign of Vladimir Putin, who is expected to announce he will run for re-election in 2018. Vedomosti was given this information by a source close to the Kremlin, and it was corroborated by another source. The idea for the movement was not generated by the Kremlin, but nor did Ovechkin come up with the idea himself, our two sources claimed. According to them, the idea was conceived by IMA Consulting (a subsidiary of IMA Group). The Kremlin signed off on the idea after it was launched, one of our sources added.

Ovechkin announced he was establishing Putin Team on November 2.

“I am sure there are many of us who support Vladimir Putin. So let’s unite and show everyone a strong and united Russia!” Ovechkin wrote on Instagram, adding he had never hidden his attitude to the president and had always openly supported him.

Ovechkin’s appeal was supported by NHL Hall of Fame inductee Pavel Bure, Ilya Kovalchuk, a player with the Petersburg side SKA, and the governors of Tula and Moscow regions, Alexei Dyumin (Putin’s ex-aide and a Night Hockey League player) and Andrei Vorobyov. Ovechkin’s announcement has not been followed by any formal actions or explanations. Ovechkin’s agent Gleb Chistyakov told Vedomosti he had nothing to say about the movement for the time being, and he also refused to comment on who had come up with the idea.

When asked by Vedomosti whether it was IMA who had come up with the idea for Putin Team, Vartan Sarkisov, general director of IMA Consulting, said, “It’s not true.”

In August, IMA Consulting won a tender from the Central Election Commission to develop the concept for a campaign raising awareness of the presidential election. IMA will be one of the key players in everything the Kremlin has planned for the election, we were told by our source close to the presidential administration, and Ovechkin’s movement could become part of Putin’s campaign. The idea behind the undertaking is that “celebrities support Putin,” our other source close to the Kremlin told us.

Russian has been no stranger to such organizations. Thus, in December 2007, as Putin’s second term as president came to a close, the Movement for Putin emerged, advocating Putin retain power as the “national leader.” In 2009, a co-leader of For Putin, Pavel Astakhov, was named the national children’s rights ombudsman.

Ovechkin’s movement would mainly be useful to Kremlin as a means of shaking the western stereotype that Russia’s finest people [sic] do not support Putin, but back the opposition, political scientist Yevgeny Minchenko said. According to Minchenko, the emergence in Putin’s camp of a figure popular in the west, such as Ovechkin [sic], would increase the president’s legitimacy in the eyes of the west [sic]. Minchenko has seen with his own eyes how Ovechkin is regarded in Washington, DC, where he has a “quite large fan club.” In Russia, however, the movement will be considerably less effective and will not significantly increase the number of votes Putin wins in the election, argues Minchenko.

Such movements are always needed on the international stage, and not just in the run-up to elections, argues pro-Kremlin political scientist Andrei Kolyadin.

“A person who has found the courage to speak up for a national leader whom some American politicians regard as an incarnation of pure evil, and defend the interests of a country not liked in the US, can cause a wave of similar actions by people forced to hide their respect for Russia.”

The movement is also capable of producing extra votes for Putin in Russia, argues Kolyadin. Very many people regard Ovechkin as an opinion leader [sic], and finding opinion leaders who sincerely support you requires great talent on the part of spin doctors running any politician’s election campaign.

Translated by the Russian Reader