Tag: torture

Victims Too

For years, survivors of Assad and Russia’s chemical attacks in Syria were silenced. Today, we uncovered shocking evidence that many of these witnesses were forcibly taken to Moscow and pressured to lie – part of an extensive cover-up by the Russian state.

Now, with Assad no longer in power, these survivors are free to speak. In this video, they reveal the horrific reality of the chemical attacks – scenes of unimaginable suffering, children foaming at the mouth, and entire families wiped out.

As someone living in Ukraine, I’ve witnessed Russia’s war crimes firsthand – from white phosphorus to targeted civilian attacks. The patterns of brutality are clear, stretching from Syria to Ukraine.

This story exposes the disinformation campaign that echoed globally, amplified by figures like Aaron Maté and platforms like RT. But the truth matters now more than ever.

Watch as the survivors share their experiences and shed light on the true scale of Russia’s actions – crimes that continue to affect lives across multiple continents.

Source: Caolan Robertson (YouTube), 5 January 2025. Thanks to Michael Karidjis for the heads-up.

“Muskovites [sic] celebrating the New Year on Teatralnaya Square.” Photo: Yevgeny Messman/TASS (via Moscow Times)

Victimhood can be a tricky thing. Nobody doubts that ordinary Ukrainians are victims of this war. Russia’s political opposition, in exile, prison or dead, are also viewed as victims. But what of the country’s silent majority? What of the millions who stayed in Russia, kept their heads down and focused on living their ordinary lives, rather than the war and the online space it occupied?

Many things have changed in Russia since 2022. But one of the main constants has been the average Russian citizen’s desire for peace and ending the war. The majority have not been militantly opposed to or cheering the war effort on. Instead, they have been focused on living in the present, trying to salvage what remains of normality and longing for its imminent return – what some are calling the silent majority.

They are not happy with the war or satisfied with the current situation and have few ways of expressing that. Many do feel guilt on a certain (very private) level.

One thing hard not to notice in Russia throughout the conflict is how that silent majority has simply hunkered down and carried on. The war is very much in the background now. When I leave my building every morning, the same middle-aged man is defrosting his car, mothers are walking with strollers and children are heading to the local school.

When you eavesdrop on their conversations or stop to say hello, they sound normal – not like indoctrinated quasi-fascists, as some scholars are suggesting. They sound like any other school child whose teacher is just trying to get through the copious material thrown at them by the school director. The mothers just want their children to grow up in safety and comfort. Cheering on an expensive war pushing up the price of baby food is hardly a means of achieving that.

The war may come to an end in 2025. Negotiations are likelier than at any point since early 2022. And make no mistake, a peace agreement is inevitable. When the war ends, however, on whatever terms, Russia and its population of 146 million will still be there. It will not disappear or suddenly go away. The man defrosting his car as I write these words is not likely to have a huge epiphany when it does. His life has hardly changed since 2022. The increased number of women publicly wearing hijabs in our city is not doing so as a passive sign of resistance.

By living here, watching life unfold how it does, the more one cannot help but think something that many in the West will find unpopular. The war is not their fault. Tens of millions of innocent Russians are victims too. Their freedoms have been curtailed, their movements and opportunities restricted. Did they deserve that by virtue of where they were born? A classic liberal would argue not.

Like millions across the world, the average Russian is just trying to feed and raise their families, and get through the month. Many colleagues in academia have questioned from the comforts of the West, their tenured positions and with nothing to lose why many Russians do nothing to oppose the regime. What they neglect when arguing from their moral high ground is that those people I spoke of earlier do have a lot to lose being critical online. They have about as much power to topple the regime and change its course on the war, as the average Westerner does.

There will be blame to go around. Russian officials and the security apparatus, who carried out the decisions to invade Ukraine and suppress its own population, are obvious contenders. On the Ukrainian side, President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals will have to answer for decisions they made. Kyiv’s Western allies clearly could have done more to support Ukraine, yet did not. 

Russia’s silent majority will not want to be blamed and they must not be. They personally did not harm anybody or choose the war. Unlike routine acts of everyday life, the war was not their personal fault or responsibility. Collective guilt is too controversial; thousands protested, millions left and staying silent was, in its own way, an act of defiance by refusing to enter the discourse. Guilt by association is also not a tenable position. Not every Soviet citizen was responsible for the Stalinist Terror. Not every Russian citizen can be responsible for the war, especially not on the basis that they refused to cheer on Ukraine and their own country’s defeat.

Blaming those who are faultless will only cause resentment where there was none to begin with. In the long term, it will not make the world safer or more peaceful. Then comes one of liberal democracy’s sore spots that Ukraine, Georgia and even Moldova will have to reckon with on its European journeys: those people in the silent majority will still have a right to have an opinion – as will the pro-Russian segments of their populations. Dismissing these views or people will not make them, nor those in power, more rational.

If the West were serious, it would try to reach out to Russia’s silent majority, who can be won over. The Russian population at large do not hold the same positions as those in and around the Kremlin currently. Most of the population wants Russia to be an open, peaceful country, especially to the West. Make no mistake, westerners, their companies, money and popular culture will be welcomed back with open arms one day. Moreover, this part of Russian society will want to be welcomed back, too. Not doing so only will push the Kremlin into a closer alliance with the likes of China and North Korea.  

Moreover, it is absolutely naive to assume that Russia’s social and economic problems will be fixed automatically by the sudden absence of Putin and the return of democracy. Although it stands a much better chance, we have been here before and there is no guarantee of success. Democracy will need to involve this silent majority beyond Moscow and the big cities – felt on the local level – seen to be actually working and fixing the people’s problems. If not, that silent majority will simply resign themselves, remaining disillusioned and ambivalent.

Gleb Pavlovsky once predicted what the end of the Putin regime would look like: it would collapse in a day and be replaced by something exactly the same. He may be proven right. If he is, that is the fault of those in power, not Russian society.

Source: Anonymous, “Russia’s Silent Majority Are Victims Too,” Moscow Times, 1 January 2025. This is not a parody, apparently, although it reads like one. ||| TRR

Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 in Taganrog (Rostov Region) was a place where, until 2022, minors, women, and mothers with children were detained. After the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine, Russian security forces cleared the detention center to make room for Ukrainian army soldiers and other prisoners of war, including the defenders of the Azovstal steel plant.

Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 gained a reputation as a gruesome torture camp for Ukrainian detainees. Many POWs in other detention centers are threatened with being sent to Taganrog and so forced not to oppose the prosecution. Few people have come forward to talk about the torture.

The story of Ukrainian Dmytro Lisovets was one of the first indications that the detention center in Taganrog had been turned into a torture camp. Lisovets had tried to flee with his family from occupied Mariupol, but failed to get through a filtration point in the Rostov Region. A former member of Ukrainian volunteer units, Lisovets was sent to the Taganrog detention center without being assigned any procedural status.

Lisovets’s lawyer told Mediazona that the Russian authorities “don’t pull any punches with the Ukrainians in this detention center”: “They burst into the cells in masks and beat everyone indiscriminately.” His client was also beaten and tortured in order to force him to admit that he had been involved in the hostilities. Consequently, Lisovets was sentenced to sixteen years in prison.

Once they were detained at Taganrog pretrial detention center, the Ukrainians were completely cut off from the outside world. According to one of the lawyers defending the prisoners, they were not allowed to talk to their clients in private, only in the presence of a police investigator. Moreover, the detention center staff forced the detainees to sign papers waiving their right to communicate with their defense lawyers.

The detainees were able to talk about the torture only after they had been transferred to other pretrial detention facilities.

“We were thrown from the back of KamAZ trucks—our hands tied and eyes blindfolded—and forced to line up against the wall under a hail of blows, where the beatings continued with hands, feet, batons and electric shockers,” one of the captured Ukrainians told his lawyers.

He also said that “at the offices” (that is, during interrogations) he would be bound with a leather belt, placed on the floor, and have a sandbag placed on his chest to make it harder for him to breathe. He would then be beaten with a rubber truncheon and tortured with a stun gun. “It was during such ‘procedures’ that [the Russians] extracted confessions of ‘war crimes,'” the Ukrainian wrote.

There were also mass beatings, including during rare walks outside in the yard. “At every turn of the walking route, a special forces soldier was stationed and was obliged to hit [the prisoners] with a stick,” said one of the convicts. Some officers were “humane” and did not beat wounded prisoners ands prisoners ofter fifty. “The attitude toward us in captivity depended on who was on duty in the prison. There were wardens who would beat all the prisoners,” said Yuriy Hulchuk, an Ukrainiian marine who spent time in Pretrial Detention Center No. 2.

There was no decent food in the detention center either. One of the defense lawyers of the Ukrainian prisoners, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that once a day the wardens “would feed them cabbage broth and quarters of black or white bread.” Ukrainian military officer Artem Serednyak was detained at the Taganrog detention center from September 2022 to the summer of 2023, during which time he lost twenty-two kilograms.

One of the prisoners calls Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 “hell with all its demons,” where it is scary to return: “Even the definition of ‘concentration camp’ would be too mild for Pretrial Detention Center No. 2,” he said. Human rights activists say that there was also sexualized violence against prisoners at the detention center: for example, prisoners had rubber truncheons shoved up their anus.

It was not only military personnel who were locked up in the detention center. For example, Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, who was detained by the Russians in the occupied part of Donetsk Region, was sent to the Taganrog pretrial detention center for a year. She died last year: presumably, she was about to be exchanged for Russian prisoners. She did not have time to provide details about her life in the detention center. It is only known that Roshchyna was held in solitary confinement from May to September 2024.

The Russian authorities have not reacted in any way to the reports of torture. Russian human rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova visited the pretrial detention facilities where Ukrainian prisoners are held, but she did not report poor detention conditions either. Human rights activists say that the administrators of the detention centers would get ready for such inspections. “[T]hey prepared for this day: everyone was given new clothes, the grass was painted, the lawns were trimmed, and so on. They even gave them [the Ukrainian prisoners] biscuits, which they were extremely happy about, because the usual diet was very meagre,” [Irina Soboleva], one of the lawyers defending Ukrainian prisoners, says.

Source: “There is a torture prison for Ukrainians in Taganrog,” WTF? newsletter (Mediazona), 9 January 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

In the age of forever war, the use of mercenaries, paramilitary forces, and irregular troops have become increasingly common on the battlefield. But now Russia is resorting to luring unwitting civilians from Yemen and other countries across Asia with little to no military experience to fight alongside its troops in the war in Ukraine.

As reported by Ali Younes, a recruitment network run by a high-ranking Yemeni political and military official with ties to the Houthi government is tricking young Yemeni men desperate for jobs into signing employment contracts for work in Russia, only for them to find once they arrive that they cannot leave and are forced into military training camps and sent to the frontlines.

As the war in Ukraine approaches its fourth year with no end in sight, Russia has turned to recruiting unwitting young men from Yemen and other Arab countries to fight alongside its troops on the front lines. The men are lured under false pretenses, they tell Drop Site News, with promises of lucrative jobs and opportunities for migration, unaware that they are being forcibly recruited as mercenaries to fight in a foreign war despite having little to no military experience.

Two men who fell victim to the scheme told Drop Site they found out they were being sent to fight with the Russian army in the Ukraine war only once they had landed in Russia. Drop Site obtained a copy of an employment contract, corroborating photos and video, and spoke with a human rights organization that has documented the practice.

Mohamad, a Yemeni national who declined to give his last name for security reasons, said he was working in a restaurant in Oman in July when he was approached by Abdul Wali Al Jabri, a high-ranking Yemeni political and military official. Mohamad said they told him about job opportunities in Russia with a good salary and a hefty signing bonus and that he would be working for a civilian company according to his skills. He was eventually convinced to sign up through a company that recruits laborers in Yemen and Oman owned by Al Jabri, who is a general in the Yemeni armed forces of the Houthi government and a member of parliament in Sanaa.

Mohamad said the agreement between the Yemeni recruits and Al Jabri was a monthly salary of $2,500 with a signing bonus of $20,000. A copy of an employment contract written in both Arabic and English obtained by Drop Site lists the Al Jabri General Trading & Investment Co. SPC and Abdul Wali Al Jabri as the company representative. The contract outlines the company’s role in arranging for jobs in Russia “in the military, security, or civil field, based on…qualifications, experience, and capabilities” and says the contract ends after the signee “obtains Russian citizenship.” Mohamad said he was never told that he would be sent to fight for the Russian army in Ukraine and there is no indication in the contract.

Al Jabri has a fee built into the contract, whereby the signee is obliged to pay him $3,000 upon getting employed in Russia. Al-Jabri did not respond to repeated messages of inquiry from Drop Site for this story. However, Al Jabri did respond to questions posed by Tawfik Alhamidi, a Yemeni lawyer and human rights defender based in Geneva, Switzerland who runs the SAM Organization for Rights and Freedoms, and has documented the forced recruitment of poor young Yemeni men into Russia’s war with Ukraine.

Al-Jabri defended the practice to Alhamidi, saying he owns a “travel company” and that people in Yemen have asked him to “arrange for them to travel to Russia and join the army in order to obtain Russian citizenship and earn money to spend on their families back in Yemen.”

He dismissed criticism, adding that “he obtained a Russian approval for the Yemeni men to travel to Russia with good salaries but some political parties in Yemen who are currently fighting Ansar Allah [the Houthis] became worried that they might lose their soldiers to go fight with Russia and therefore created a social media storm over this issue.”

In September, Mohamad traveled to the Russian city of Nizhny [sic] via Dubai. He shared a video of himself with Drop Site on the plane, holding his boarding passes. He and a group of around 20 Yemeni men stayed in Nizhny for 24 hours before being shipped to the city of Rostov, a command base for the Russian army near the frontlines with Ukraine. They also discovered that their salaries were just $300 a month with a meager signing bonus.

Mohamad said that in both Nizhny and Rostov the Yemeni men were met by Russian soldiers. Mohamad said that they were forced to sign another contract, written in Russian, that obliged them to serve in the Russian military. “We were forced to sign contracts in the Russian language that we didn’t understand to serve in the Russian military,” Mohamad said. “We were very afraid.”

He said that in Rostov his group protested to the Russian officers that they didn’t want to fight in the war and demanded to go back to Yemen but they were prevented and ended up being forced to stay in Russia for months where they were forced into military training camps. Mohamed also shared a photo of a Yemeni recruit in full military fatigues and combat gear holding an assault rifle and another of a dog tag written in Cyrillic.

“We were trained by an Arabic-speaking Egyptian Russian military officer who told us that we are in Russia to fight for the Russian army and that we will be deployed to the front lines and not working as civilians,” Mohamad said. He said in the camp he met many men from Iraq, Syria, and Sudan and elsewhere receiving military training. Mohamed was finally able to return to Yemen at the end of October and he spoke to Drop Site from Sanaa.

Another video shared by Mohamed [sic] with Drop Site shows a group of about 10 Yemeni men inside a tent with wooden bunk beds in Nizhny. In the video, one man says, “We came from the sultanate of Oman for civilian work, everyone according their skills,” pointing to each one in turn, he adds, “This man is a metalworker, this man works with hydraulics, this man is an electrician, this man is a driver, this man works with electrical equipment. We are all civilians who work civilian jobs.” He goes on to say they were taken from the airport to Nizhny and they were “terrorized by armed soldiers and forced to sign contracts.” Pointing to a pile of camo backpacks on the floor, he says they were being taken to a training camp. “We are civilians and we know nothing of this,” he says in the video and calls on the Yemeni government to help them. “We are sons of Yemen and we fell into a trap.”

Drop Site also communicated via WhatsApp messages with Jalal, another Yemeni man recruited by the same network who is currently deployed as a soldier fighting for Russia in Ukraine. He told Drop Site he was lured into coming to Russia to escape poverty with the promise of a large salary and signing bonus as well as Russian citizenship. He said he ultimately decided to stay and fight in the war in the hope that he could earn enough money to be able to return to Yemen with savings as well as to possibly obtain Russian citizenship.

Alhamidi characterizes the recruitment practice as exploitative and a human rights violation.

“Dire poverty conditions in Yemen enabled human trafficking and recruitment networks to proliferate and lure young men to go to Russia under false promises of civilian work and high salaries,” Alhamidi told Drop Site, adding that Yemen’s laws contain many loopholes that [allow] Yemeni nationals to join foreign armies as mercenaries without being criminalized. “This has enabled powerful men in Yemen with connections to the Houthi government and Russia to mislead hundreds of young men into traveling to Russia to fight in Ukraine.”

A report by SAM published in November based on interviews with several Yemeni nationals who who were recruited by Al-Jabri and traveled to Russia titled, “With False Promises of Jobs and Attractive Salaries: Recruitment Networks Force Yemeni Youth into the Russia-Ukraine War,” found that: “The forced recruitment of Yemeni youth into the Russian-Ukrainian war through coercive networks constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law and human rights and rises to the level of human trafficking… The organization reported that once recruits arrive in Russia, they are subjected to severe abuses, including being forced to fight under harsh and inhumane conditions, being deprived of food and medical care, and suffering injuries or death from indiscriminate shelling on the battlefronts.”

According to Alhamidi, Al Jabri has traveled to Russia numerous times and has obtained visas to Russia for thousands of Yemenis to lure them into traveling there and forcing them into military training camps, though it is unclear how many have actually made the trip.

Similar recruitment networks in other countries have lured unwitting civilians to Russia with promises of work or other opportunities and then forced them to serve in the Russian army. One human trafficking network in India sent dozens of Indian nationals to Russia for combat training before being deployed to the front. Citizens of Nepal and Sri Lanka have also been illegally recruited in similar ways to fight for Russia in Ukraine.

Source: Ali Younes, “Russia is luring unwitting Yemeni civilians to fight in Ukraine,” Drop Site, 10 January 2025

Igor Paskar: The Case File

Igor Paskar has been sentenced to eight-and-a-half years’ imprisonment for two anti-war actions. In June 2022, in the centre of Krasnodar, Igor set fire to a “Z” banner [a symbol of support for the Russian military]. Two days later, he protested at the local office of the Federal Security Service (FSB), by throwing a Molotov cocktail at the stone porch of the building, while his face was painted with the colours of the Ukrainian flag. The FSB and the courts defined this as “vandalism” and an “act of terrorism.”

Igor Paskar

Igor Paskar was born in Nikolaevsky village, a working-class community in the northern part of Volgograd Region. He went to school there. After doing national service on building sites in Samara, he worked as a courier, and for haulage and construction companies.

Paskar had three previous convictions. The first time he went to court, at the age of 22, was for possession of a few grams of cannabis: he was given a five-year suspended sentence. “In the milieu in which I grew up, half of the people I knew – if not more than half – smoked cannabis. It was not considered to be asocial or objectionable. But the motherland has decided that, in contrast to drinking alcohol, that’s serious criminal behaviour,” Igor said. Three years later, Paskar was in court again, and this time was sentenced to two years in prison for the theft of, and possession of, drugs. He points out that, from the moment of his first time in court, the police searched him regularly, and said quite openly that they were looking for weed. Igor’s third time in court was in 2006, when he received a one-and-a-half year suspended sentence for possession of narcotics. “That’s how I came to the attention of our law enforcement agencies. And from then on, I didn’t have a life,” he recalled. Given these circumstances, in 2013 Igor moved to Moscow.

In the capital, Igor continued working in various jobs, and helping his mother, until she died in 2017. This was around the time his social conscience took shape.

“As far back as I remember, even when I was very young, I was always concerned about what was happening in our country. Our motherland, in the guise of the Russian state, always seemed like a stepmother to me, not a real mother. I was never indifferent to the pressure that the state brought to bear on those who dissented or disagreed,” Igor said in court.

In 2020 Igor went to the Belarusian embassy to express solidarity with those who protested after the blatant falsification of the results of the presidential election, in which Belarusian president Alyaksandr Lukashenko gave himself 93% of the votes. “That summer and autumn, in 2020, when Belarus’s tinpot dictator was pushing his people around, I was still hoping that here in Russia we would avoid that kind of thing,” Igor says.

In 2021 Igor participated in a big protest staged after the arrest of Alexei Navalny. He was detained, brought to court and fined 10,000 rubles.

The all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 decided things for Igor once and for all. He decided to undertake a symbolic anti-war action, to support people in Ukraine. On 12 June 2022, the Russia Day national holiday, Igor set fire to a pro-war banner displaying the letter “Z” and the militarist slogan “We don’t abandon our own.” However, the action did not attract the attention Igor had hoped it would.

He decided on a second protest. On 14 June he threw an improvised Molotov cocktail at the stone porch of the FSB offices in Krasnodar. It set fire only to a plastic mat. As Igor later stated in court, his action was entirely symbolic and posed no threat to anyone’s life. For Paskar, the action was an expression of solidarity with people in Ukraine, and a signal to those in Russia who did not support the war that they were not alone. “My action was peaceful, and aimed to show all who opposed this monstrous war that they were not isolated, and to show our Ukrainian neighbours, that we [in Russia] have not all been turned in to zombies by state propaganda,” he said in court.

Igor was arrested a few minutes after throwing the Molotov cocktail at the FSB building. “I stood outside the building and waited for them. I made no attempt to hide or to evade arrest,” Igor recalled in court. The police arrived, asked if it was him who had started the fire, and, when he confirmed that it was, they put him in handcuffs and took him in to the FSB premises.

“There were people in uniform, perhaps six to eight of them,” Igor said. “They snapped a photo of me on a phone: that picture is in the case file, and it shows that I had no injuries. Then they asked me what I wanted, why I did that. I answered that I wanted to make use of Article 51 of the Constitution, that gives you the right not to incriminate yourself. They obviously found that funny, because a split-second later a sack was put over my head. The next few hours were among the very worst of my life.”

Continue reading “Igor Paskar: The Case File” →

In Plain Sight

Accused terrorist Shamsidin Fariduni, with bruising on his face, inside a Moscow courtroom.
Photo: Yulia Morozova/Reuters via the New York Times

It seems that one of the consequences of this tragedy [i.e., the terrorist attack on the concert hall in suburban Moscow] has been the legalization, or legitimization, of torture. Torture existed before, but it was concealed and formally condemned. Now torture is openly praised and flaunted, and state institutions, including courts, do not react in any way. Another step towards fascization.

Source: Sergey Abashin (Facebook), 25 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Warning: this newsletter contains numerous descriptions of violence and torture.

People are tortured every day in Russia. For a long time we have been hearing about torture in penal colonies and police departments from victims and human rights activists. Mops and electric shockers have been mentioned in reports in the independent media and in the accounts of people who were subjected to violence, but the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) and the police themselves have usually denied the accusations. Even in today’s Russia, however, the courts have periodically tried to imprison law enforcers who have tortured people, such as those implicated in the Karelian penal colony case, the Yaroslavl case, and the Saratov prison hospital case.

The terrorist attack in suburban Moscow has changed everything.

On 22 March, gunmen killed at least 137 people at the Crocus City Hall concert venue outside Moscow. They set fire to the building and left before the police arrived. Law enforcers have already detained suspects, and the Z bloggers have been salivating over the photos and videos of their abuse at the hands of the authorities. Never before have we had such flagrant acknowledgement of torture.

“The law enforcers have often covered their tracks by sweeping stories of torture under the rug, and we were told that there was no torture, that the reports were nonsense,” Sergei Babinets, head of the Crew Against Torture, said in an interview with Mediazona. “But since yesterday it seems as if there is a path to making torture a little more public.”

Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev (whom propagandist Margarita Simonyan dubbed the “ringleader” of the terrorists) was brought to his arraignment hearing with bruises on his face and remnants of a bag around his neck. He had no bruises at the time of his arrest, and the bag could have been used by law enforcers to strangle Mirzoyev. When the judge announced the pretrial restraint measures (Mirzoyev was remanded in custody to a pretrial detention center) Mirzoyev could not stand up. Instead, he leaned against the wall of the “fish tank” in the courtroom.

Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda was brought to the hearing with his head bandaged. A law enforcer had cut off his ear when he was detained and tried to make him eat it. Neo-Nazi Yevgeny “TopaZ” Rasskazov of the nationalist subversive group Rusich announced an auction for the knife that was allegedly used to cut off Rachabalizoda’s ear.

The third detainee, Shamsidin Fariduni, was also apparently tortured. Telegram channels associated with law enforcement circulated a photo of Fariduni lying on the ground with his pants pulled down and law enforcement officers standing over him. There are wires from a field telephone attached to his groin. Such wires are used to electrocute detainees. (They have been used, for example, on detained Ukrainians in the occupied territories.) And someone is also stepping on Fariduni with a foot shod in an army tactical boot. Fariduni arrived in court with a swollen and beaten face.

Muhammadsobir Faizov. Photo: Alexandra Astakhova/Mediazona

Finally, the fourth detainee, Muhammadsobir Faizov, came to the court from the intensive care unit in a wheelchair. He could barely speak, and was hooked up to a catheter and a urinal. One of his eyes was injured. For the duration of the hearing, his doctors—two women in ambulance corps uniforms who had arrived with Faizov—were asked to leave the courtroom.

Why is this happening? Sergei Babinets argues that law enforcers could have been affected by the absence of major terrorist attacks in recent years.

“Many people were simply not ready for it—not ready emotionally, not ready psychologically, not ready on various fronts. And people may have started to lose their nerve due to this. That’s why there have been calls to reinstate the death penalty, to locate all the guilty parties and execute them, for example,” he said.

Аccording to Babinеts, Russian aggression in Ukraine has also played a role.

“The normalization of violence may have aggravated the situation with torture. We can see that law enforcement officers are really starting to let themselves go more,” he said.

Babinets adds, however, that there is no point to this violence.

“Torture most often leads to the torturer obtaining the information he wanted to obtain initially,” he said. “If they want a person to confess that they had been working, for example, for the Ukrainian army, they can be tortured until they confess. It is impossible to effectively investigate crimes in this way.”

Source: “Torture has gone public,” WTF? newsletter (Mediazona), 25 March 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

It’s more than two decades since I read the late Stanley Cohen’s ground-breaking States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (2001). In the introduction, Cohen recalls his own experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, when he asked himself why his own outrage at the injustice he observed all around was not reflected in the society around him:

Why did others, even those raised in similar families, school and neighbourhoods, who read the same papers, walked the same streets, apparently not “see” what we saw. Could they be living in another perceptual universe — where the horrors of apartheid were invisible and the physical presence of black people often slipped from awareness? Or perhaps they saw exactly what we saw, but just didn’t care or didn’t see anything wrong.

Cohen went on to become a sociologist and a lifelong human rights activist. States of Denial was a valiant attempt to bring his discipline to bear on the subject of why people become become ‘everyday bystanders’ of atrocities who ‘block out, shut off or repress’ troubling or disturbing information to the point when they ‘react as if they do not know what they know.’

Some of these observations related to Israel, where Cohen moved in 1980. A Zionist in his youth, Cohen opposed the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and became a strong critic of Israeli repression of the Palestinians. In his book, he describes his work with the Israeli human rights group B’Ttselem on the torture of Palestinian detainees and the obstacles it encountered:

Our evidence of the routine use of violent and illegal methods of interrogation was to be confirmed by numerous other sources. But we were immediately thrown into the politics of denial. The official and mainstream response was venomous: outright denial (it doesn’t happen); discrediting (the organization was biased, manipulated or gullible); renaming (yes, something does happen, but it is not torture); and justification (anyway ‘it’ was morally justified). Liberals were uneasy and concerned. Yet there was no outrage.

Cohen returned to the UK in 1996, and died in 2013, but were he alive today, I suspect he would have recognized the ongoing devastation of Gaza as a textbook example of the ‘politics of denial’. According to the latest figures from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the IDF has killed more than 31,988 people, most of whom are women and children, with another 7,000 buried in the rubble, and wounded 74,188. To put these figures in perspective, this February civilian casualties in Ukraine were estimated at 10,582 dead and 19,875 injured since the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022.

So in just under six months, Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza than Russia has killed in two years. It has destroyed or damaged more than 60 percent of Gaza’s housing stock, 3 churches, 224 mosques, 155 health centres, 126 ambulances. Nearly 2.3 million Palestinians have been displaced, and 1.1 million people are facing ‘catastrophic levels of food insecurity,’ which threatens to become a famine.

All this has been done with the indirect support or direct collusion of the United States government, the European Union, and the British government. Despite the outpouring of rage and horror on the streets of so many cities across the world, liberal democracies that claim to uphold an international order based on human rights and universal moral norms have ‘known and not known’ what has been taking place in front of their eyes.

Many of these governments once railed against ‘dictators killing their own people’, and used atrocities and human rights abuses as a moral lubricant for liberal ‘interventions’ and ‘ humanitarian’ wars to prevent ‘massacres’ and ‘bloodbaths.’ Apart from a few tepid words of condemnation, when the obscenity of what is unfolding became too much to ignore, these same governments have enabled Israel to inflict incredible carnage on a mostly unarmed and defenceless population.

None of is taking place in secret. In February, Amnesty claimed that ‘Fresh evidence of deadly unlawful attacks in the occupied Gaza Strip…demonstrates how Israeli forces continue to flout international humanitarian law, obliterating entire families with total impunity.’ Israeli soldiers routinely post tweets and TikTok videos of themselves gleefully blowing up Palestinian homes, wearing Palestinian lingerie and women’s dresses, humiliating Palestinian prisoners made to strip down to their underwear, and generally exulting in the destruction.

[…]

Source: Matt Carr, “In Plain Sight: Atrocity Denialism and the Destruction of Gaza,” Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine, 26 March 2024

GOOP

Veterans of the special military operation and combat veterans will be able to teach the new subject “Fundamentals of the Security and Defense of the Motherland” in schools after undergoing retraining at the State University of Education (GOOP), according to Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov, who was speaking at a plenary session during the Russian national pedagogical forum “Memory Is Sacred.”

“A center for retraining veterans of the special military operation and combat veterans as teachers was created this year at GOOP to implement a new subject area with a priority on practical training in the new subject ‘Fundamentals of the Security and Defense of the Motherland,'” Kravtsov said.

The official logo of the State University of Education (GOOP)

According to the minister, the basic military training module would be enhanced in this subject, which is being implemented as part of the “Fundamentals of Health and Safety” curriculum. The new subject would be trialed this year, and it would be taught in schools beginning in the next academic year, he added.

On June 30, Kravtsov said that, as part of the subject, schoolchildren would gain knowledge of the “role the defense of the country plays in its peaceful socio-economic development and the current complexion of our our Armed Forces.” Schoolchildren would be introduced to concepts such as “military duty” and “military service.” The minister emphasized that the load on schoolchildren would not increase—the number of classroom hours would remain the same.

GOOP’s acting rector Irina Kokoyeva told Vedomosti that the Apex Center for Military-Patriotic Education had been operating at the university since September 1. One of the center’s focus areas is the professional development and retraining of special operation veterans as coordinators of military-patriotic clubs and teachers of the subject “Fundamentals of the Security and Defense of the Motherland.” “We plan to recruit a pilot group in this focus area. Information about the conditions and criteria for recruitment will be posted on the university’s official website in the near future,” she added.

Tuition for veterans of the special operation will be free, Olga Kazakova, head of the State Duma’s education committee, told Vedomosti. According to her, the program at the training center will help veterans who don’t have the requisite knowledge in the fields of child psychology or pedagogy. The deputy also recalled that it was the education committee’s initiative to establish the center. “Together with the State Duma’s defense committee, we are forming a working group on the teaching of this subject. And, of course, we will be directly involved in the process of preparing the curriculum, teachers, and the facilities and resources for these lessons,” she added.

All people, regardless of whether they were involved in the special operation, must undergo special psychological tests to be cleared to work with children, says clinical psychologist Ilya Gavin. “It is good practice to check any category of people working with children. People come in all shapes and sizes, including those with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder],” the expert said.

Per the Health Ministry’s standing order No. 342n, all teaching staff are required, as of 1 September 2022, to undergo a psychiatric examination to be cleared to work with children. Previously, teachers were only required to undergo an annual medical examination, as well as an examination when applying for a job. Prior to 2022, employees of educational institutions underwent psychiatric examination at least once every five years.

According to Gavin, the time it takes to recover from PTSD and return to everyday life directly depends on the severity of the disorder, because it can also be accompanied by the emergence of addictions. “The rehabilitation period can vary from three months to a year. The PTSD treatment protocol also includes ten to fifteen sessions of work with a psychologist once a week,” Gavin concluded.

Source: Anastasia Mayer, “Duma readying retraining program for special operation veterans to teach in schools: soldiers will gain knowledge in child psychology and pedagogy,” Vedomosti, 7 September 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

GENEVA, June 15 (Reuters) – A group of U.N. experts said on Thursday they had written to Moscow raising concerns about the use of torture by Russian military forces on Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war.

The U.N. experts said in a statement the torture included electric shocks, hoodings and mock executions and had been carried out to extract intelligence, force confessions or in response to alleged support for Ukraine’s forces.

It had resulted in damage to internal organs, cracked bones and fractures, strokes and psychological traumas, they said.

A spokesperson for Russia’s diplomatic mission in Geneva did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Moscow has previously denied torturing or mistreating prisoners of war and says it does not deliberately target civilians in Ukraine.

While torture allegations have previously been levelled against both sides in the 15-month conflict, the team of U.N. independent experts said Russian forces’ methods may be “state-endorsed”.

The consistency and methods of alleged torture suggested “a level of coordination, planning and organisation, as well as the direct authorisation, deliberate policy or official tolerance from superior authorities”, according to U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Alice Jill Edwards, who sent the letter on 12 June alongside several other independent experts.

“Obeying a superior order or policy direction cannot be invoked as justification for torture, and any individual involved should be promptly investigated and prosecuted by independent authorities,” she said.

Under the U.N. system, a government has 60 days to give a formal response.

Source: “UN experts raise ‘widespread’ torture concerns with Russia,” Reuters, 15 June 2023

Pickleball, Octopus, Political Prisoner, Putin, Prigozhin, Pretty Girls


The Hustle, “The Economics of Pickleball and the Sport’s Sound Problems”
MBARI, “Scientists solve mystery of why thousands of octopus migrate to deep-sea thermal springs”

Sergei Okrushko

Solidarity Zone has begun supporting Sergei Okrushko

On July 28, an explosion occurred at the Kuibyshev Oil Refinery in Samara. The same day, 42-year-old Sergei Okrushko, who was born in Ukraine and worked as an electrician at the refinery, was detained at the border with Kazakhstan whilst trying to leave Russia. The FSB charged him with “sabotage” (per Article 281 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Sabotage”, and a court in Samara remanded him in custody to a pretrial detention center.

Okrushko confessed, and at his bail hearing he said that he held anti-war views and committed the action for political reasons.

It also transpired that Okrushko had earlier tried to enter Ukraine, but he was not admitted because of his Russian passport. During his stay in Moldova, he had repeatedly participated in anti-war protests.

No one was injured during the explosion at the refinery. According to the investigation, more than 30 million rubles in physical damage was caused, however.

The Kuibyshev Oil Refinery is the largest enterprise in the Samara Region, processing about seven million tons of oil per year. The plant specializes in the production of fuel for all types of transport from automobiles to ships.

On August 3, Okrushko refused the services of Solidarity Zone-affiliated lawyer Zakhar Lebedev, whom he had agreed to let defend him two days earlier. While Okrushko was writing the waiver of counsel, the lawyer noticed fresh injuries on Okrushko’s body: “I noticed that his left arm, namely most of his shoulder and forearm, was purple. It was clear that these were hematomas, which hadn’t been there on August 1 when I visited him at the pretrial detention center. When I asked Sergei where he had got such bruises, he said, without hesitating, “When they arrested me.” When I asked why they had not been there when I’d visited him at the pretrial detention center, Sergei hesitantly said that they’d shown up only now.”

We believe that the fresh bruises and his sudden and unmotivated waiver of counsel testify to the fact that Sergei Okrushko was tortured between August 1 and August 3.

Subsequently, the authorities stopped admitting any lawyers into the pretrial detention center, except for the court-appointed lawyer Vyacheslav Pavelkin. Later, it transpired that Okrushko was taken to the FSB several times without a lawyer.

Unfortunately, at this stage we have been unable to provide Sergei with defense counsel. But at the very outset of his ordeal, we sent him a care package and books, placed an order at the online Federal Penitentiary Service store, and transferred money to his personal account at the pretrial detention center. We recently learned that Sergei received all these things, which means that we were able to provide him with at least minimal humanitarian support. In the coming days, we will put together another care package for Sergei and continue to support him as much as possible.

Solidarity Zone’s mission is to support people imprisoned for anti-war direct-action protests and not let them face the system alone. We cannot always provide full-fledged support due to interference from the security forces, but we consider any reduction in the harm caused by the actions of the Russian state to be a decent outcome.

If you want to support us, you can find our details here.

💌📦 Address for letters and parcels:

Okrushko Sergei Aleksandrovich (born 01.03.1981)
22 Sadovyi proyezd, SIZO-1
Samara 443021 Russian Federation

You can also send letters via Zonatelecom.

#politicalprisoners #ukrainians #crackdown #torture #fsb #fsblawlessness #solidarity #nowar #wewriteletters #samara

Source: Solidarity Zone (Facebook), 24 August 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader. People living outside of Russia will find it difficult or impossible to send letters to Russian prisons via Zonatelecom or regular mail. In many cases, however, you can send letters (which must be written in Russian or translated into Russian) via the free, volunteer-run service RosUznik. Mr. Okrushko has not yet appeared on their list of supported addressees, however. You can write to me (avvakum@pm.me) for assistance and advice in sending letters to her and other Russian political prisoners.

Putin

Prigozhin

The cast of Our Dear Dead Drug Lord

Recommended for ages 16 and up. This production contains sexually suggestive language, references to suicide, and depictions of drug use, extreme physical violence towards humans and animals, and self harm. This production also contains the use of herbal cigarettes, haze, and a brief flash of light.

The Distance Between Krasnoobsk and Moscow Is 3,420 Kilometers

A screenshot of Dmitry Karimov telling his story on camera to “Caution, News”

Five persons unknown abducted and tortured Dmitry Karimov, a 22-year-old resident of Krasnoobsk (Novosibirsk Region), in order to get him to confess to burning a banner in support of the Special Military Operation. The young man told the Telegram channel “Caution, News” [which has 1,443,493 subscribers] about the incident.

According to Karimov, on the morning of October 14, five men in mufti attacked him and pushed him into a vehicle. “I was screaming, calling for help, and they used a cattle prod on me,” he said, adding that they immediately accused him of setting fire to the banner, a crime which he did not commit.

Then, according to Karimov, the men took him to the forest, handcuffed him, strangled him, threatened to shoot him, and offered to convey to his parents his last words if he did not confess to the arson. Karimov confessed under duress. He was taken home, where a search took place, during which the security forces seized electronic devices and a jacket.

The detainee was then taken to the police station. Karimov said that during the interrogation he tried to tell the truth, but he was threatened with being sent to the war in Ukraine, and due to fear and coercion, he confessed.

The detainee’s mother Ekaterina Mikhasyonok said that her son is a third-category disabled person: he has been diagnosed with an organic lesion of the central nervous system, and has hearing and speech problems. She added that when her son did not return from school, she began looking for him. At about nine in the evening, she went to the police station, where she was told that Karimov was there.

Karimov was charged with “intentional destruction or damage to property by arson” (per Article 167.2 of the Criminal Code) and released on his own recognizance.

Source: “Novosibirsk Region resident says he was tortured into confessing to torching pro-SMO banner,” OVD Info, 16 November 2022. Thanks to Jenya Kulakova for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday named several supporters of the war in Ukraine to the presidential Human Rights Council in a shake-up of the body which appeared to purge members who have publicly expressed doubts about the war. 

War correspondent Alexander Kots and two other prominent supporters of the war were added to the council, while 10 members, including the well-known television host Nikolai Svanidze, found themselves removed from the body. 

Kots, a journalist for the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid who also runs the popular Telegram channel Kotsnews, has risen to prominence during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as he has been embedded with Russian forces throughout the war. 

While he has reported on Ukraine since 2014, he has faced repeated accusations of being a mouthpiece for the Kremlin since the start of Russia’s 2022 invasion, most notably for his claim that the massacre of Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha was staged by Kyiv.

Also added to the body on Thursday were Yulia Belekhova of the All-Russian People’s Front, an organization that raises money to support pro-Kremlin separatist forces in Ukraine’s Donbas region, as well as Elena Shishkina, a member of the Free Donbas party in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. 

The 10 members removed from the body include Svanidze, who has increasingly voiced his concerns over Russia’s invasion and who called for curbs on the death penalty in the Donetsk region in an open letter to Putin in August.

Prominent rights activist Igor Kalyapin and leading anti-xenophobia researcher Alexander Verkhovsky were also removed from the council in Thursday’s shake-up.

Russia’s Human Rights Council, which was established by presidential decree in 2004 to guarantee and protect human rights in Russia, has been criticized for failing to challenge Putin as members have been ousted and replaced with more Kremlin-friendly figures over the years.

The council has been chaired by journalist and war supporter Valery Fadeyev since 2019.

Source: “Putin Names War Supporters to Russia’s Human Rights Council,” Moscow Times, 17 November 2022

The Zhanaozen Massacre: Ten Years Later

Kazakhstan, ten years after the Zhanaozen massacre: oil workers’ fight to organise goes on • People and Nature • 15 December 2021

Ten years after police massacred striking oil workers at Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan, human rights organisations and trades unionists are demanding an international inquiry into the killings.

Even now, the number of victims is unknown. State officials admit that 16 were killed and 64 injured on 16 December 2011 – but campaigners say there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, more.

The initial killings, by police who fired into a peaceful, unarmed crowd, were followed by a three-day reign of terror in Zhanaozen, in the oil-rich Mangistau province in western Kazakhstan, and nearby villages.

Defendants at the 2012 trial of Zhanaozen protesters

The torture and sexual violence used against detainees should also be investigated by an independent international commission, campaigners say.

Although a handful of police officers were tried for “exceeding their powers”, and a detention centre boss was briefly jailed, the Kazakh government has refused to say who ordered the shootings.

The Zhanaozen shootings ended an eight-month strike by the town’s oil workers, one of the largest industrial actions ever in the post-Soviet countries.

Oil workers and their families had demanded better pay and conditions, and the right to organise independent trade unions, at Ozenmunaigaz, a production subsidiary of the national oil company Kazmunaigaz, and contracting firms.

On Saturday 11 December this year, oil workers gathered in Zhanaozen, amidst a heavy police presence, to commemorate the victims. Tomorrow, ten years to the day after the tragedy, activists plan film screenings and other gatherings in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city.

Zhanaozen has become a crucial strand in Kazakh working people’s collective memory. On the day of the killings, local residents risked arrest and worse to smuggle out of the locked-down city video clips showing how demonstrators were executed in cold blood. Today, some of the fear has faded, activists say: whole films – such as this one, made in 2013 (commentary in Russian) – are shared on social media.

https://www.facebook.com/daryn.ibraeff/videos/1302525450187459

An international investigation is needed, because, even now, the Kazakh authorities are desperate to cover up the truth, human rights activists who have pursued the truth about Zhanaozen said in interviews with People & Nature.

Evgeny Zhovtis, director of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and the Rule of Law, said “three questions have never been answered” about the events on Alan Square, where the initial shootings took place:

□ Who were the provocateurs who caused trouble on the square?

□ Who exactly gave the order to send in armed interior ministry forces against an unarmed crowd? 

□ Who fired the shots? The authorities have admitted to 15 killings on the square. In each case, [under Kazakh law] an investigation should show either that the officer responsible had opened fire unlawfully, or that he opened fire because his life was threatened.  

Zhovtis said: “The UN commissioner for human rights, Niva Pillay, visited Kazakhstan in 2012 and called for an independent international commission to be set up, to investigate these events. Maina Kiai, the UN special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, also called for such a commission. This has not happened.”

Human rights defenders in Kazakhstan reject the justice ministry’s claim that an adequate investigation had been carried out, Zhovtis said.

Police in Zhanaozen, 16 December 2011. A still from a video smuggled out by residents to make sure the truth reached the outside world

“The leading western governments are largely indifferent to what happens in central Asia. Look at their response both to the Zhanaozen tragedy and the Andijan massacre [of hundreds of protesters in Uzbekistan in May 2005].

“Nevertheless, we simply have to keep demanding justice.”   

Galym Ageleuov of Liberty, the human rights organisation, who has travelled regularly to Zhanaozen since the massacre to gather evidence, said that, in addition to the events on Alan Square, any investigation should cover:

□ The use of torture against oil workers and their supporters detained during the three-day crackdown. Detailed evidence of this had already been made public, especially at a trial of 37 Zhanaozen residents in 2012.

□ Sexual violence against women detainees, including Roza Tuletaeva, an oil workers’ trade union organiser (about her release, see here and here); Zhansaule Karabalaeva, daughter of a trade union activist; Asem Kenzhebaeva, daughter of another activist (the family’s story here, her evidence of sexual violence here); and others. “There is evidence that women and men prisoners were detained naked [in winter], were beaten, and had freezing water poured on them”, Ageleuov said.

□ The total number of killings in Zhanaozen and nearby villages on 16, 17 and 18 December 2011. Of the 16 admitted by officials, 15 were killed on Alan Square with revolvers, bullets from which usually remain lodged in the body. The authorities have denied responsibility for those killed by automatic gunfire and long-distance sniper fire, including bystanders. Ageleuov said: “There are numerous cases in which bodies were only released to the families of those killed if they accepted death certificates that registered the cause of death as, for example, a heart attack.”

Asem Kenzhebaeva

□ The killing of Torebek Tolegenov in Shetpe, and the wounding of young people who blocked a railroad to protest at the Zhanaozen massacre, needs to be investigated.

□ Multiple reports of bodies being loaded into unmarked graves – including by Yelena Kostiuchenko of Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s prime opposition newspaper, one of the first journalists to get into Zhanaozen after the massacre – have never been followed up. “Any international commission should insist on the exhumation of these bodies”, Ageleuov said.

□ A fire that broke out, inexplicably, at the Ozenmunaigaz offices on the day of the massacre.

The Kazakh labour movement will this week commemorate the Zhanaozen tragedy – at a time when the right to form independent trade unions, a key principle in the 2011 oil workers’ strike, is again at issue in many workplace struggles.

In June, the national oil company Kazmunaigaz tried to scrap an agreement on wages and conditions with the independent Oil Construction Company Workers Union, seeking instead a sweetheart deal with a “union” it had created. That followed an attempt by the authorities to deregister, and effectively put beyond the law, the independent Sectoral Union of Fuel and Energy Workers, a national-level umbrella of which the Oil Construction Company Workers Union is part.

Markhaba Khalmurzaeva, coordinator of the Central Asia Labour Rights Monitoring Mission, said: “There have been several strikes in which workers demanded the right to independent organisation, and in some cases, once the pay dispute was settled, employers even helped to register unions.”

But there is also a constant campaign of repression. “Quite often a strike will be settled, some demands are met, but activists who played a part in organising it are dismissed, and blacklisted.”

These battles for the right to independent organisation flared up earlier this year amidst a wave of strikes over pay and conditions. There were more strikes in the first half of 2021 than in the three years 2018-2020 put together. And this summer, the wave hit the western Kazakhstan oilfield, including Zhanaozen, where 11 firms were on strike simultaneously in July.

In September the Central Asia Labour Rights Monitoring Mission reported:

Most of the strikes are in the rich oil region of Mangistau in western Kazakhstan, although it is not only oil workers who are walking out. The most widespread demand is for wage increases. Some groups of workers demand a 13th wage [i.e. to be paid an extra month’s money each year]; partial or complete funding of sanatorium breaks for those working with toxic chemicals; compensation for Covid-19 tests; and … [a supply of] milk [at work].

In Zhanaozen, in the years after the massacre, the Ozenmunaigaz oil company was reorganised into 14 separate divisions. Many of the strikers were employed in the drilling services division, where pay was raised substantially and today is at more than twice the level of ten years ago.

In an attempt to smother the social discontent that exploded in 2011, the government invested in the town’s infrastructure, providing among other things round-the-clock water supply, where previously water only reached people’s homes for short periods twice a day.

Zhanaozen’s population has also expanded … but not everyone benefits. Unemployment has grown rapidly, and in 2019 young people began to demonstrate at the local authorities’ offices, demanding work at Ozenmunaigaz.

A mass meeting in July this year at KMG Security, one of 11 workplaces on strike in Zhanaozen. Photo: Manas Kalyrtai RFE/RL

Erzhan Elshibayev, who helped to organise these peaceful gatherings, was arrested and jailed for five years. Galym Ageleuov said: “Elshibayev is a victim of political repression. In 2019, he was charged with an offence arising from a fight he was involved in, when he was attacked by four men in 2017 while on his way to work – an incident that gave rise to no charges at the time.

“Elshibayev has been in detention for two years. For the last three months he has been in solitary confinement and no-one has heard from him.” Trade unionists gathered at Bishkek last week at a conference called on the Kazakh authorities to release him immediately.

Ten years after the massacre, labour’s battles against capital continue in the oilfield – for better pay and living conditions, for the right to organise independently at work, for ways to live decently. Exposing the truth about the state repression in 2011, about the chain of command, about the barbaric use of murder and torture in the service of capital, is a part of this wider struggle. SP, 15 December 2021.

■ Statement by human rights organisations in Kazakhstan, 15 December 2021

■ Zhanaozen: worker organisation and repression, by Simon Pirani (Gabriel Levy)

■ Zhanaozen: some lessons by Evgeny Zhovtis

■ They shot to kill. Interview with Galym Ageleuov

■ Kazakh oil workers: index of articles

“Freedom of association is a workers’ right! Free Erzhan Elshibayev! Stop victimising people for being active citizens!”

Originally posted on People & Nature on 15 December 2021. Thanks to its editor, Simon Pirani, for allowing me to repost his article here. ||| TRR

The English Lesson

Jenya Kulakova
Facebook
November 18, 2021

A trifle, but an unpleasant one all the same.

According to the Russian Penal Code, convicted foreign nationals have the right to communicate with prison wardens in any language they speak and receive a response in that language. Vitya [Viktor Filinkov], as you know, is a citizen of Kazakhstan. In response to the razor blades planted [and “found”] by prison officials in his cell on his birthday, he wrote a statement in English.

And what do you think happened? The penal colony found an English teacher, Nadezhda Ivanovna Zhavikova, who works at Night School No. 13. in Orenburg, who “checked” Vitya’s composition and “corrected” the “mistakes” in it so that the text would better suit the wardens. The only thing she didn’t do, unfortunately, was grade the composition. But the prison staff probably gave her an A.

Vitya writes, “Before I started, current inspector had said that I should REPLACE my prison uniform. I DECLINED but he took it and gave me new one.”

The meaning is clear. What does Nadezhda Ivanovna write in [her] translation?

“Before that, the duty inspector told me to PUT my clothes in ORDER. I SUGGESTED that he take it away and give me a new one in return.”

At issue here is the tunic that was replaced against Vitya’s will before he went to the baths. After he came back, prison officials “found” a shard of a blade in the seam of the tunic. It thus transpires that it was Vitya who asked for it to be replaced.

Vitya ends his statement with an appreciation of the production staged by the Correctional Colony No. 1 troupe: “I didn’t brake the razor, it’s a play. Good scenario, actors. Good game, well played.”

Nadezhda Ivanovna feigns that she didn’t understand what was at issue, and translates [the passage] as if Vitya was bragging about his own play-acting: “I didn’t break the razor, it’s a game. A good acting script. A good performance, well ACTED [by Vitya, apparently [because the verb is the singular in Russian, not the plural —TRR]].”

Maybe, of course, the teacher didn’t do it out of spite, but simply couldn’t make sense [of Filinkov’s statement]. But somehow it seems to me that she made perfect sense of it and even made it over [to satisfy the wardens].

UPDATE. On a more practical note, if you have a translator’s diploma and would like to write a specialist’s opinion for the upcoming hearing appealing Vitya’s transfer to a single-cell facility for a month, you’re welcome!

Team Navalny
Instagram
November 15, 2021

❗️ Viktor Filinkov and the torture colony

Viktor is a political prisoner in the Network case. The case is about a “terrorist community” of young men who were fond of airsoft and openly voiced opposition to Putin.

The FSB took these two facts and cooked up charges that got the defendants sent to prison for terms from six to eighteen years. Allegedly, the young men were divided into combat groups that were supposed to organize bombings in order to “sway the masses for further destabilization of the political situation in the country.”

The defendants claim that they were tortured into confessing, and that the evidence in the case was completely manufactured by the security forces.

The verdicts were announced in February 2020. But the matter did not end when the young men were sent to penal colonies: the authorities began bullying them there. We know the most about their treatment of Viktor Filinkov.

For the slightest offense — such as “didn’t say hello ten times a day to a prison employee,” “washed ten minutes earlier than he was supposed to,” “left his work station during work (he went to the work station next to his to ask how to use the machine because he hadn’t been properly instructed)” —  Viktor is sent to a punitive detention cell. Letters from [Viktor’s] friends and relatives are opened, shown to other prisoners, and even replies to them are forged.

Things are so over the top that when there was a scabies outbreak in [Viktor’s] cell, his cellmates were given ointment, but Viktor himself was not, because “he complained.”

Now Viktor is being transferred to Correctional Colony No. 5 in Novotroitsk, to an isolated solitary cell, for repeatedly violating those supremely absurd rules. This colony is a torture colony, one of the most violent in Russia. In June, twelve inmates there engaged in a “collective act of self-mutilation” to protest the torture.

The Putin regime is a regime of vengeful scum. No one is safe from their lawlessness. This nightmare will become more and more commonplace with every passing day. Don’t let that happen.

More information about how Victor is being bullied can be found in the article linked to in stories.

Release political prisoners!

Translated by the Russian Reader

Doppelganger

“It’s kind of a dystopia. In some respects. Of course, it has nothing to do with reality. The world is shrinking and becoming cramped. Something or someone is always offended in close quarters. And there’s always someone pointing a gun at your head. Sometimes it’s you.”

Masyanya, Episode 152: “Doppelganger.” (Toggle the “CC” button for English subtitles)

____________

The caste of those deprived of their civil rights — foreign agents, undesirable organizations, extremists of all stripes — will constantly expand. Social stigmatization will be strongly encouraged. The number of persons on different registries and lists, and under police watch will grow exponentially. Legal restrictions — bans on participating in elections, serving on various public councils, founding mass media, attending football matches, working in certain areas, and so on — will be supplemented by defamation campaigns. The separation of the estates in terms of legal and social status will be vigorously encouraged by the authorities.

Source: Pavel Chikov, “Not a Tyranny Yet: A Prognosis for the Rest of Putin’s Fourth Term,” Republic, 19 October 2021. Translated by the Russian Reader

____________

 

Artist unknown, Russian National Guardsmen in Their Free Time. Posted by Dmitry Vrubel on Facebook. Thanks to Sergei Damberg for the heads-up

____________

Security forces raided a gathering to write letters to political prisoners at the Vogel Bar. They showed up along with Rospotrebnadzor officials for a surprise inspection on the evening of October 24. After managing to tally forty-five people on the premises and not find markings on the floor mats, the officials sealed the establishment prior to a court hearing. The bar’s management fears bankruptcy and plans to open a new bar in a new location.

The latest gathering to letters to political prisoners at the Vogel this time ended with a visit by regulatory authorities. The police officers who arrived twenty minutes after the event started immediately stated that the 76th police precinct had received a complaint alleging that the bar was not in compliance with the mask mandate. At that moment, the gathering, at which attendees were to write letters to the performance artist Pavel Krisevich, jailed on charges of disorderly conduct after a performance on Red Square in which he pretended to shoot himself, had just begun. That evening, Krisevich’s friends and acquaintances, as well as former political prisoners, were to speak to the guests. One of the bar’s co-founders, Valentin Khoroshenin, told Zaks.Ru that the complaint claimed that a “meeting of anti-covidniks” was planned for that evening at the Vogel. He believes that this was just an excuse to find non-existent violations and close the bar.

The inspection report indicated that more than forty-five people were present in the room at the time. The bar’s management are adamant that this was not the case. The Vogel’s owners have already studied surveillance camera tapes and counted less than forty people on the premises, including the police officers.

Other violations included the absence of markings on floor mats and an insufficient supply of medical masks. According to regulations, such establishments should have a five days’ supply of personal protective equipment. The available supply was only enough for one day. Rospotrebnadzor officials did not enter the kitchen. According to Khoroshenin, they claimed they were too tired to do so.

Vogel Bar has been in business since March 2021. From the very beginning it advertised itself as a venue for activists: political lectures, discussions and debates were held there. During this entire time, Rospotrebnadzor never carried out inspections. But the Interior Ministry regularly sent its people there. For example, Center “E” officers attended the debates. The security forces showed up for other letter-writing gatherings, but everything had ended without trouble.

Text & photos: Konstantin Lenkov, Zaks.ru, 25 October 2021. Translated by the Russian Reader

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We have been preparing an investigation into torture in Russian prisons for almost a year. It took a lot of time to track down, earn the trust of, and obtain testimonies from former inmates of the penal colony in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Siberia, thousands of kilometers from central Russia. Simultaneously with The Insider’s investigation, Russian human rights activists published an archive of video footage depicting torture being inflicted on prisoners across Russia. The clips, obtained from the FSB and FSIN secret archive, show prisoners from Irkutsk, Saratov, Belgorod, Rostov and other Russian regions being raped, beaten and humiliated. Torture victims explain their torturers’ motives by their desire to break their will in order to obtain material for blackmailing other prisoners, make them confess to crimes, pay tribute, or even to start torturing other prisoners themselves. This all takes place in the modern world, in a country where there is no war, where torturers are not tasked with extracting valuable military information from prisoners at any cost. Torture is rampant in Russia, a country that has signed a number of human rights and anti-torture conventions and seems to enjoy a peaceful life. We have long known that in Russia, prison is not a place of correction, but rather a strange world separate from everything else, where guards and inmates resurrect on a daily basis the practices of the Stalinist Gulag. This has not always been the case. As early as ten years ago there was serious talk in Russia about the need to reform and humanize the penitentiary system. Now things are different. The authorities have been clearly and unambiguously showing how they prefer to rule the country. That is mainly by fear. Investigations into torture have hardly been a revelation, but in a split instant, they made it impossible to ignore torture and pretend it only concerns those behind bars. Of course, the situation will not change overnight, but one thing is certain – this knowledge has now become an integral part of our society. In the following article, we bring you the raw testimony of people who have experienced torture in Russian prisons. They share their thoughts on why it is used, the impact on them, and recount the involvement even of doctors in their ordeal.

Source: The Insider, 19 October 2021. Thanks to Antti Rautiainen for the heads-up

Network Case Defendant Maxim Ivankin Claims He Was Tortured into Memorizing Meduza’s Smear and Repeating It as a “Confession”

Maxim Ivankin in court. Still from a video by 7×7. Image courtesy of Novaya Gazeta

“They put me on a spreader and beat me”: man convicted in Network case confesses to murder after he is subjected to “course of treatment”
Yan Shenkman
Novaya Gazeta
October 5, 2021

Maxim Ivankin, convicted in the Network case, has turned up at Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 1 in Ryazan. During the three weeks when he was officially in transit from Chuvashia to Ryazan, and not accessible to his lawyers, he signed a confession in the so-called Ryazan case, admitting his complicity in the murders of Artyom Dorofeyev and Katya Levchenko. Only a few days later, however, he complained that he had been subjected to physical coercion and retracted his testimony.

Russian Investigative Committee investigators have long been attempting to connect the Ryazan case with the Network case. Here are several facts supporting this hypothesis:

1. The investigation was initially based on the account given by Alexei Poltavets to the news website Meduza. Poltavets claimed that he and Ivankin committed the murders in the spring of 2017. There was no significant corroboration of Poltavets’s account before Ivankin confessed, nor did the authorities particularly look for such evidence. Poltavets himself is currently in hiding in Ukraine. He has not been questioned by the Russian authorities, and so his account is inadmissible in court. However, the investigation did not consider any other explanations for the murders. It is not surprising, then, that Ivankin’s confession is a slightly modified variation on Poltavets’s monologue.

2. In the spring and summer of this year, Investigative Committee investigator A.M. Kosenko made the rounds of the penal colonies where the men convicted in the Network case are serving their sentences. According to some of them, he demanded that they bear false witness against Ivankin. Or, to put it more delicately, Kosenko was gathering evidence against Ivankin. After refusing to speak without a lawyer present, some of the convicted men (for example, Mikhail Kulkov and Ilya Shakursky) were sent to punitive detention cells. For completely other reasons, of course.

3. Ivankin was threatened with violence if he did not cooperate with the investigation, and these threats were also communicated to his wife, Anna.

The day after Ivankin was dispatched to Ryazan, he found himself in Nizhny Novgorod and, a bit later, in Vladimir. If you look on the map you’ll see that neither Nizhny nor Vladimir are on the way from Chuvashia to Ryazan. There is a direct road between them, which lies much farther to the south than the route by which Ivankin was transported.

Judging by the stories of convicts, the penal colonies in Vladimir, in particular, the hospital at Penal Colony No. 3 (aka Motorka), have a reputation as places where where prisoners are taken to be coerced and beaten into testifying. The most famous example is the case of Gor Hovakimyan, who died after being tortured in the hospital at Penal Colony No. 3. Ivankin was taken to this hospital. “I still do not know what my diagnosis is,” he said in a statement to his lawyers.

Vladimir Osechkin, the founder of the project Gulagu.net, recently reported that his organization had more than 1,000 Federal Penitentiary Service videos corroborating that torture takes place in Russian penal colonies, including footage from the Vladimir region.

And now the most important part. Lawyers Svetlana Sidorkina and Konstantin Kartashov visited Ivankin in the Ryazan pre-trial detention center on October 4 and 5. They have given Novaya Gazeta a copy of their official, on-the-record conversation with Ivankin, from which we have excerpted the following passages:

Question: Were you subjected to psychological and physical pressure in the hospital? If yes, what were the circumstances?

Answer: Yes, I was. Immediately, when I was brought to the hospital, I was met by the “reds” (activists from among the inmates)… The inmates began beating me in the back of the head and the kidneys… I will be able to identify the activists… When I was asked to sign a statement, I was put on a spreader for refusing to sign, and I was beaten in this position.

This treatment lasted about nine days. It is difficult to say more precisely: Ivankin himself has doubts. Apparently, he lost track of time.

I told them I was not involved in the murders of Dorofeyev and Levchenko… The field officers said that they were not satisfied with my position, and demanded that I rewrite the handwritten confession written by them, which I was forced to rewrite under the supervision of several activists. The events described in the confession matched the account given by journalists in the media (“Meduza”).

The activists forced me to learn the contents of the confession by heart. Until I had repeated it to them verbatim, I was not allowed to sleep… Investigator Kosenko arrived and wrote up a report that he had received the confession…

I was forced, in writing, to waive the services of my private legal counsel and my right to have my relatives notified… I made the confession out of fear for my life and safety…

My testimony was verified at the crime scene. The whole thing was a farce, because I don’t know what happened. In all the documents I indicated that I had not been coerced [into confessing], but I had to say that, out of fear for my life.

And here is the result: an indictment order. Previously, we should recall, Ivankin was officially a witness in the Ryazan case. If he was treated this way as a witness,  what awaits him as an indicted man?

Under Article 105.2 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code (premeditated murder and conspiracy to murder) Ivankin faces a possible life sentence.

If Russia had the death penalty, Ivankin would be sentenced to death.

I have before me a document from the Federal Penitentiary Service in which what happened to Ivankin is called a “course of treatment.” “Maxim now shudders when he hears the word ‘Vladimir,'” says his lawyer Konstantin Kartashov. Nevertheless, he retracted his confession. But he did say, “If the publicity subsides, I’m finished.”

Translated by the Russian Reader