A pediatrician has been imprisoned on the strength of a denunciation by her patient’s mother. The pediatrician allegedly insulted the boy’s father, who had been killed in the war. There were no witnesses to the conversation, and it seems that the decisive factor in the verdict was the pediatrician’s birthplace — Lviv. Only recently I published the file of the criminal case against my great-uncle, who had allegedly spread rumors about the fall of Soviet regime among children at an orphanage. There, too, the accused’s background was an important point of the accusation: the arrested man’s father had once been a prosperous peasant. It was obvious to the investigators (and this was explicitly stated in the verdict) that the status of “kulak’s son” was in itself proof that the charges were true.
Lo and behold we’re back where we started: a person born in Lviv is guilty of course and must have said what they have been accused of saying.
I don’t know why we should measure things off in terms of milestones on the road to a familiar hell, but this is certainly a milestone.
Source: Natalia Vvedenskaya (Facebook), 13 November 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader
A Moscow court on Tuesday sentenced a pediatrician to five and a half years in prison for criticizing the war in Ukraine during a patient visit earlier this year.
Nadezhda Buyanova, 68, was found guilty of spreading “fake” information on the Russian army under wartime laws used to silence dissent.
“I believe this is absurd,” she said in court Tuesday, moments before Judge Olga Fedina announced her sentence.
Buyanova was arrested in February after the ex-wife of a soldier who was killed in Ukraine, Anastasia Akinshina, said she had criticized Russia’s role in the conflict during an appointment.
Several of Buyanova’s supporters, mostly medical professionals, shouted “Shame on you!” in the court as the sentence was announced.
“We must empathize with one another and love others,” Buyanova said in court. “But there is no paradise on earth, there is no peace on earth.”
She protested her innocence throughout the trial.
“I am a pediatrician. I do not regret a single day,” Buyanova said.
Buyanova was prosecuted despite there being no public evidence that she criticized the war. Akinshina’s seven-year-old son testified against Buyanova in court.
Monday, 18 November, 6 p.m. “Political prisoners in Russia and the Occupied Territories of Ukraine”.
Panel discussion with Sergei Davidis (Memorial), Evgeny Zakharov (Kharkhiv Human Rights Protection Group), Bill Bowring (Birkbeck, University of London) and Judith Pallot (Gulag Echoes research project / University of Oxford).
At: Montague Lecture Centre, Graduate Centre, Queen Mary University of London, 327 Mile End Road, London E1 4NS. Also on line, via Zoom.
All welcome. Event organised by the Queen Mary University, London, Centre for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies. Register on Eventbrite here.
Source: Ukraine Information Group
