Мужик подогнал свою машину к зданию призывной комиссии и стал бросать коктейли Молотова. Выгорело 100 м². Урюпинск. Волгоградская область. Россия. 26.09. 2022 pic.twitter.com/yjB9QMdyKO
Guryanov Sergei @Segozavr A man backed his car up to the building housing the draft board [conscription office] and began tossing Molotov cocktails. 100 square meters were destroyed by fire. Uryupinsk, Volgograd Region, Russia, 26.09.2022.
A screenshot of the visuals in Mr. Stupin’s original post
In Moscow’s Kosino-Ukhtomsky district, housing authority employees and police officers, without showing their IDs, have been breaking open front doors in the staircases of residential buildings in order to serve residents with summonses to the military enlistment office! Some residents have already been issued threats that the electrical wires to their apartments will be cut if the men do not open the door to receive a summons!
Source: Yevgeny Stupin, Facebook, 26 September 2022. Thanks to Alexander Kynev for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader
A telephone call I got yesterday from a female acquaintance has made me think about the economic consequences of the “mogilization” [literally, “grave-ization,” a play on the word “mobilization”]. I confirmed her fears that her son would be among the first to be mobilized. And that they would come looking for him first at his registered address, then at his workplace. Consequently, the solution to his problem would be to quit his job and go live somewhere in the boondocks for a year, even if there was no work there.
And now look — not only those who are called up will vanish from workplaces, but also those who dodge the draft. To get the three hundred thousand men declared [by Putin as the goal of his “partial mobilization”], they have to slap the asses of at least a million men with draft notices and dragnets. I’m not an economist and I cannot even estimate numerically what kind of blow to the country’s GDP will be caused by the withdrawal of at least half a million employees.
By the way, the mobilized must be fired [by law]. It is not very clear whether their jobs will be kept for them in any way. But [officially] they will not be listed as on leave, but as having been called up from the reserves to military training camps. They will simply be dismissed from their jobs, and they will have to be paid in full.
Really simple vacancies can be filled by migrants from Central Asia, but it is another matter whether they will go and fill them. Currently, the exchange rate has been maintained at a level that is favorable to migrant workers, but as soon as the volume of imports grows (and it will grow: there will be other sources, gray market goods/parallel imports, and so on), this rate will inevitably begin to sink. Consequently, the economy will take a simultaneous triple hit around December:
1) On December 5, a complete ban on the delivery of Russian crude oil to the EU will come into effect; 2) hundreds of thousands of people will be laid off in October, November, and December; 3) and the exchange rate will go crazy.
By the way, state-funded and quasi-state-funded organizations will face the biggest problems. Petersburgers are no stranger to it, but the snow will definitely not be removed this year, either.
That’s my economic forecast for you. It’s going to be a clusterfuck, my fellow Russians.
Source: Vladimir Volokhonsky, Facebook, 22 September 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader
Yesterday, Vladimir Putin announced a “partial” mobilization, which is actually a total mobilization. His decree sets no restrictions on age, qualifications, regions, and the number of people mobilized. Already today, we see that everyone is being called up.
Source: Navalny LIVE, YouTube, 22 September 2022. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader. The video has already been viewed over 2.6 million times since it was posted. It has no subtitles in English, but the message from the lawyer in the video is clear and simple: there is no such thing as a “partial” mobilization, so all draft-age men must avoid being called up and serving at all costs, especially since Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine is illegal and criminal.
Dmitry Lyamin’s headshot from Odnoklassniki.ru (“Classmates.ru”
If there is an actual “Russian anti-war movement,” this is what it looks like: Dmitry Lyamin, accused of torching a military conscription office in Shuya, the third largest town in the Ivanovo Region. Lyamin has been transferred from Ivanovo to the notorious Butyrka remand prison in Moscow, allegedly, so that he can undergo a psychiatric examination at the equally notorious Serbsky Institute. According to former political prisoner Ivan Astashin, who now spends all his waking hours helping the new wave of political prisoners in Russia and publicizing their cases, there are rumors among the legal community that the criminal charge Lyamin faces will be changed from “destruction of property” (Article 167 in the Russian Federal Criminal Code) to “terrorist act” (Article 205), a much more serious charge that carries a penalty of up to twenty years in prison.
Ukrainian activists in the Eastern Human Rights Group are using social media to build up a register of people forcibly deported from Russian-occupied areas.
A bot has been launched on Telegram (@come_back_to_ukraine_bot) to contact citizens removed to Russia.
Deporting people against their will is a war crime. International and local human rights organisations, and the Ukrainian government, say there is mounting evidence that Russia is doing so on a large scale.
The Russian defence ministry said on 18 June that more than 1.9 million people, including 307,000 children, had been evacuated from Ukraine to Russia since the full-scale invasion on 24 February. Ukrainian activists deny Russian claims that all evacuees have left Ukraine voluntarily.
“If we don’t find how to help them, Russia will erase the Ukrainian identity of these children,” Oleksandra Matviichuk of the Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties responded.
The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group in April protested against a scheme to resettle residents of Mariupol in the most inhospitable and distant areas of Russia.
Halya Coynash reported that the Mariupol council had drawn attention to a leaflet distributed to Mariupol residents “inviting” them to the Russian Far East. She commented:
First, they destroy a successful and warm city on the Sea of Azov, and then they drive its residents to Siberia or Sakhalin to work as cheap labour.
Mariupol’s mayor, Vadim Boichenko, said that he has a list of 33,500 residents forcibly deported either to Russia or to the Donbass “republics,” and is coordinating rescue efforts.
Coynash also published details of the “filtration” of residents in the occupied areas by Russian forces, with those considered “unreliable” being sent to detention camps in the Donbass “republics.”
Ukraine’s human rights ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova said last month that 210,000 children, and more than 1 million other Ukrainians, had been deported against their will. Reuters reported these numbers, saying they could not independently verify them, and that the Kremlin had not responded to a request for comment.
Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, said earlier this month that a war crimes case was being built up relating to the deportation of children to Russia.
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), in its report on human rights violations in Ukraine between 24 February and 12 April, said that its Mission had received “numerous consistent reports” on forced deportations from the occupied territories to Russia. It said that Russia had denied these accusations, but added:
If (some of) these deportations were forcible (including because Russia created a coercive environment in which those civilians had no other choice than to leave for Russia) and as they necessarily concerned civilians who had fallen into the power of Russia as an occupying power, this violates in each case International Humanitarian Law and constitutes a war crime.
Mateusz Morawiecki, prime minister of Poland, said on a visit to Kyiv this month that deportations – which recalled Poles’ experience under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union – are “an exceptional crime, about which there is almost complete silence in western Europe.”
The Eastern Human Rights Group, set up in 2014 by labour activists in Donbass and now operating from Kyiv, decided to work on a register of deported citizens after appealing unsuccessfully for the Ukrainian government to take action.
“Our team lobbied repeatedly for setting up a state structure to deal with repatriation, but, as happens quite often, the government did not listen,” the group stated on 13 June. “We decided to take action on the issue ourselves, and at a non-government level we are working on the issue of repatriating Ukrainians.”
□ Two all-European public zoom calls about the Russian-occupied areas are being held on Monday 4 July and Thursday 14 July, on which Ukrainian activists will report on what can be done to support civil society there. The initiative is supported by the European Network in Solidarity with Ukraine. You need to register in advance to participate.
□ The Eastern Human Rights Group has also reported on forcible military mobilisation in the Donbass “republics,” and use of the death penalty there. Here are three recent Facebook posts. With thanks to Anna Yegorova for the translations.
For the last three weeks, forced mobilisation in the occupied territories of Luhansk and Donetsk regions has slowed down, due to active protests by mothers, sisters, and spouses of the forcibly mobilized.
However, the Ministry of National Security in the Luhansk and Donetsk “people’s republics” swiftly suppressed women’s protests, as we recorded the detention of several women in Yenakievo and Rovenky.
Since last Saturday, military patrols searching for men of conscription age in the cities of occupied Donbas have become more active with men being detained in the streets again. (The detentions are not as massive as in March, but that is understandable: there are simply not as many men as there were in March.)
This new stage of forced mobilisation is associated with the need to send new manpower to fight in Donbass.
Forced mobilisation has again affected workers at enterprises, and enterprise managers have spoken out against it. The administrations of the “Luhansk people’s republic” and “Donetsk people’s republic” said that “construction brigades” [a term dating back to the Soviet times, usually designating student groups as “volunteers” to work on farms and plants] from the Russian Federation would soon arrive to replace the workers [so that the latter could be send to the battlefield].
Over the past three weeks, the so-called “people’s militia” of the Luhansk and Donetsk “people’s republics” has increased military patrols in the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine, due to the increasing number of defections from AK-1 and AK-2 units. Forcibly mobilised people, even after they have been dressed in uniform, seek opportunities to escape from the Russian convoy escorting them to the front line.
Frequent defections became public thanks to women in [the occupied territories of] Donetsk and Luhansk reporting to Vera Yastrebova, the head of the Eastern Human Rights group.
One woman said that her brother escaped with a group of mobilised men on the way to the front line, and now they are wanted by the local “authorities.” There are also cases when mobilised residents of the two “people’s republics” jump off trains that take them to the front line, following a brief training in the Russian Federation.
Over the past three weeks, there have been more than 100 cases of defections from the “LPR” and “DPR,” a source from the DPR told us.
By Vera Yastrebova.A working group is preparing to change the criminal “law” of the Luhansk “people’s republic” to introduce a new type of punishment – the death penalty, I have been told by sources there.
A decision was first made back in 2021, when the Kremlin decided to create unitary “legislation” for the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” and essentially rewrite the laws in Luhansk to match those of Donetsk. But they haven’t had time to do that.
Now the principle has been agreed, and changes are being developed very quickly. The haste is due to the fact that the Luhansk “people’s republic” will be able to apply the death penalty to Ukrainian prisoners of war.
The issue of the “death penalty” will be further pushed by the Kremlin, in order to force Western countries to engage in direct negotiations with the leaders of the “LPR” and “DPR,” my sources say.
□ There will be all-European public zoom calls, on Monday 4 July and Thursday 14 July, with Ukrainian activists supporting people in the occupied areas. Details and link to registration here.
Source: Simon Pirani, “Ukrainians face forcible deportation and conscription by Russian forces,” People and Nature, 27 June 2022. Reprinted here with the author’s kind permission
We started to make this film in 2014 during the annexation of Crimea by Russia. it seemed that by 2022 only the epigraph would remain relevant.
“You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men.”
I understand how and why Russian guys from the provinces ended up in Ukraine.
Source: Tatiana Chistova, Facebook, 15 May 2022. Thanks to Jenya Kulakova for the heads-up and so much more. NB. This film is freely viewable on Vimeo only today, 15 May, apparently. Since it is a “private” video, I was unable to embed it here. UPDATE (17 MAY 2022) The film seems to be indefinitely viewable, so please take the opportunity to watch it using the URL and password listed, above. An acquaintance described it as “deadly serious and very funny too.” ||| TRR
Video still of burning military recruitment office in Moscow Region. Courtesy of Moskovsky Komsomolets via the Moscow Times
Since the war in Ukraine broke out, protesters have set fire to military enlistment offices in several regions of Russia. The media has reported at least five such incidents. The people detained in these cases told police that they were trying to disrupt the spring recruitment campaign.
On February 28, a 21-year-old local resident set fire to the military enlistment office in Lukhovitsy, Moscow Region, to protest the war’s outbreak. After he was detained, he said that he wanted to destroy the archive containing the personal files of conscripts in order to prevent mobilization. Two weeks later, he escaped from the police station.
In March, military enlistment offices caught fire in Voronezh, Sverdlovsk Region, and Ivanovo Region. In all cases, local residents threw Molotov cocktails in the windows of these offices. The young men who started the fires in the Sverdlovsk and Ivanovo regions were detained. Both of them explained their actions by saying that they wanted to disrupt the draft campaign amid the hostilities in Ukraine. Moreover, persons unknown had scrawled anti-war appeals on local government buildings and shops in several towns in the Ivanovo Region before the blaze.
In April, Molotov cocktails were thrown at the military enlistment office in the village of Zubova Polyana in Mordovia. In this case, the protesters achieved their goal: the recruitment campaign was stopped. The rooms in the office where the data of conscripts were stored caught on fire.
The spring draft in Russia began on April 1 and will end on July 15. 134,500 young men are scheduled to be drafted into the army.
The Russian authorities have repeatedly claimed that conscripted soldiers will not be sent to fight in Ukraine. However, on March 9, the Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged for the first time that conscripts were fighting in Ukraine, and reported that several conscript soldiers had been captured.
On February 24, university student Anastasia Levashova threw a Molotov cocktail at an antiwar rally in Moscow. The court sentenced her to two years in prison for violating Article 318.1 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code, which criminalizes the use of violence against authorities.
“One Must Serve the Motherland, I Say!” Basmanny District Court Extends the Arrest of Bolotnaya Case Suspect and Anti-Fascist Alexei Gaskarov
October 3, 2013
Yegor Skovoroda Russkaya Planeta
Alexei Gaskarov in court, June 26, 2013. Photo: Ilya Pitalyov / RIA Novosti
On Tuesday, October 1, Moscow’s Basmanny District Court extended until February 6, 2014, the arrest of Alexei Gaskarov, whom police investigators suspect of involvement in the “mass riots” on Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012. Gaskarov has been charged with violating Article 212, Section 2 (participation in mass riots) and Article 318, Section 1 (use of violence against authorities) of the Russian Federal Criminal Code.
February 6, 2014, is the date to which the investigation of the events on Bolotnaya Square has now been officially extended. Earlier this week, the court extended the arrests of the other defendants whose cases have not yet been submitted to the court. Ilya Gushchin, Alexander Margolin, Dmitry Rukavishnikov, Sergei Udaltsov and Leonid Razvozzhayev will also remain in pre-trial custody until February 6.
Another defendant, pensioner Elena Kokhtareva, has been released under her own recognizance. The case of Udaltsov and Razvozzhayev, whom investigators have accused of organizing the “mass riots” (a violation of Article 212, Section 1 of the Criminal Code), has been separated from that of the other defendants.
Investigator Alexei Chistyakov asked the Basmanny District Court to extend Gaskarov’s arrest for another four months, as the investigators have established that Gaskarov “used violence” against Igor Ibatulin, an officer with the Second Tactical Regiment of the Moscow Police, and a soldier by the name of Bulychev.
“In defiance of society’s moral norms, Gaskarov committed the crime in the presence of a significant number of people, taking advantage of numerical and physical superiority, and showing a clear disregard for the authorities. Moreover, his role in this case was particularly active and most aggressive,” Chistyakov read aloud to the court.
According to Chistyakov, Gaskarov presented a flight risk, since before his arrest “he did not live at his registered domicile, led a secretive lifestyle, spent the night at different locations and used various conspiratorial techniques.” Gaskarov should, therefore, be kept in a pre-trial detention facility.
During the hearing, Svetlana Sidorkina, Gaskarov’s lawyer, asked the court to enter character references submitted by the newspaper Zhukovskie Vesti and the Zhukovsky People’s Council into the record, as well as screenshots of a video recording from the case file. These stills show a police officer kicking Gaskarov in the face as Gaskarov lies on the ground.
Chistyakov and the prosecutor, Karasev, did not object to the character references being entered into the record, but they strongly objected to the shot breakdown of the video.
“The actions of law enforcement officers are not at issue in this hearing,” said Chistyakov.
Judge Artur Karpov, a man with a bald skull, agreed with their arguments and refused to enter the images into the record.
“And why is that you were found only partly fit for military service?” Judge Karpov asked, suddenly digressing from the tedious review of the case file.
“For medical reasons, but I can’t remember what exactly,” Gaskarov replied.
“How is it you don’t remember? Everyone remembers the reason they didn’t go into the army, but you don’t?”
“It was ten years ago. It had something to do with my eyesight, with intracranial pressure and something else. But now I just—“
“You just got over all those things? When did that happen? Before you turned twenty-eight?”*
“I wasn’t keeping track.”
“You weren’t keeping track. . . You should have served the Motherland,” the judge muttered.
“I wouldn’t object to serving in the army in exchange for being released from jail,” the defendant laughed.
“In exchange for working as a journalist?” After reading the character reference from the Zhukovskie Vesti newspaper, Judge Karpov had for some reason decided that Gaskarov works there. “One needs to serve in the army. Anyone can be a journalist, but probably not just everyone can serve the Motherland. Why this ‘in exchange for’ right off the bat? One must serve the Motherland, I say!”
Judge Karpov was unrelenting.
“Down in Dagestan, there is a waiting list to get into the army. Being a journalist is easy. You get up when you like, go to sleep when you like, go to work when you like.”
After this emotional outburst, lawyer Svetlana Sidorkina moved that the court change Gaskarov’s measure of restraint to one not involving deprivation of liberty—to house arrest or release on bail.
“Yes, I think this would be possible,” Gaskarov replied, smiling, to the judge’s question about what he thought about the motion.
Karasev and Chistyakov categorically stated that only if Gaskarov were in a pre-trial detention facility could the investigation proceed unhindered. Judge Karpov agreed with the prosecution on this point as well and, after a recess, ordered Gaskarov’s arrest extended until February 6.
When Gaskarov spoke to the court arguing against his arrest, Chistyakov sat motionless, his hands folded in front of him, like a sphinx.
_____
Alexei Gaskarov’s argument in the Basmanny District Court:
I do not agree with the extension of my arrest and wanted to draw attention to the following things. First, I am being charged with violating Articles 212 and 318. Article 318 belongs to the category of moderately severe crimes for which the period of pre-trial detention may not exceed six months. Article 212, which criminalizes “involvement in mass riots,” stipulates more stringent sanctions, up to a year in pre-trial detention. I have a copy of my indictment, dated April 28. As of today, there has been no other indictment. According to this indictment, all the [criminal] actions that the investigator has just listed were then deemed violations of Article 318 by him.
Since the extension the investigator is now requesting means that I will have spent nine months in detention, that is, more than the statutory period of six months, I do not agree with this extension.
With regard to Article 212, I would like to return to the question of the grounds for charging me with violating it. Because even if you go by my indictment in the case file, it turns out I am accused of participation in mass riots. However, if you look at Article 212 itself, it covers mass riots “attended by violence, pogroms, arson, the destruction of property, the use of firearms, explosives, or explosive devices, and also armed resistance to government representatives.”
There is also Article 8 of the Criminal Code, which clearly states that a deed can be deemed criminal if it is fully consistent with “all the elements” of a crime, as described in one or another article in the Code. Accordingly, not all the elements of the crime, as indicated in Article 212, are included in my indictment. The article does not say that only one element or half the elements are enough. “All the elements” must be present.
Furthermore, the investigation finds that there was violence, arsons, and pogroms there [on Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012], but I have not been charged with arson and pogroms. I have been charged only with violence against police officers. But Article 318 already covers these actions, and it is unclear how one and the same action can be deemed to constitute now one crime, now another.
On the other hand, if you look at the article dealing with mass riots, it does indeed say that resisting police officers is a constituent element of the crime, but there it stipulates that this must be armed resistance. But there is nothing in the charges brought against me indicating that I used a weapon or objects that could be used as a weapon.
I ask the court to take note of this indictment, because it serves as the grounds for the decision to extend or change the measures of restraint.
There are different sorts of evidence in the indictment and the criminal case file, but they only touch on Article 318, not Article 212. There is no clear indication there which of my actions could be deemed a violation of Article 212.
Moreover, why did we want to enter these photographs [of Gaskarov being beaten by riot police on May 6, 2012 — Russkaya Planeta] into the record? They simply indicate that the situation was quite complicated. The way the indictment is worded implies that if you see a uniformed police officer, he is absolutely within the law and cannot do anything illegal. By entering these photographs into the record, we want to show that the situation was complicated.
As for the actions committed there, I don’t even deny that I pulled one officer by the leg, and another by the arm. But only Article 318 covers all these actions. And so I ask the court not to extend [my arrest] for more than six months.
That is all I have to say.
* In Russia, men are subject to military conscription between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven —Translator.
The Russian Reader 