#Halya Coynash | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chrysocomae · 2 years

Text

Even Kremlin supporters admit Russia has created ‘a humanitarian disaster zone’ in occupied Ukrainian cities

09.09.2022

By Halya Coynash

Residents of the Ukrainian cities in Donbas which Russia virtually razed to the ground while claiming to 'liberate' are facing humanitarian catastrophe this winter with Russian officials “incapable” of rebuilding what Russia has destroyed. Although the cities’ elected leaders have long spoken of the danger, the above warning came from Ihor Dimitriev, a former Odesa City Council deputy from the pro-Russian ‘Rodina’ party who threw in his lot with the aggressor state back in 2014.

While the weather remains reasonably warm, it is possible for people, for example, in occupied Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk or Mariupol, to cook and wash in the street, while hobbling some kind of existence in the ruins of their homes. That could change very soon, with the lack of electricity, running water and heating, as well as the dangerous conditions of many bombed apartment blocks, a real threat to life. Even where the Russian invaders have had time to resolve the most burning issues, this has clearly not been done. At the end of August, the Mariupol City Council posted a video of a near revolt in the city after the Red Cross tried, in the face of an overwhelming crowd, to cancel the issue of humanitarian aid. After besieging Mariupol for many months and blocking Ukrainian supplies of humanitarian supplies, Russia has now left residents dependent virtually solely on the Red Cross. It is likely that some ‘humanitarian aid’ is being sent from Russia – and syphoned off by those now controlling the city. Except, of course, for that which they show being distributed by smiling Russians in the propaganda videos which officials from Moscow are adept at organizing.

All of the above is confirmed in recent posts on his Telegram page by Ihor Dimitriev. He can certainly not be suspected of pro-Ukrainian sentiments, although his blunt honesty may well get him arrested in the ‘Russian world’ to which he switched allegiance.

On 31 August, Dimitriev also posted the videos from angry Mariupol residents. He called this the first revolt of the hungry in Mariupol, but not the last.

He then followed with the comment that, as he had said even before Russia’s full-scale invasion, “Russian officials are simply not capable of organizing normal life in the new territories. Not because they’re fools (although more often than not that too), but because the entire system of management is aimed not at working through challenges and carrying out new projects, but at stability and control.”

“For that reason, I think that the new territories will, in winter, become a humanitarian disaster zone. No restoration of heating and plumbing is taking place in many of the populated areas that suffered. The restoration of residential buildings is largely taking place only for appearances – on the main streets, they’ll erect beautiful apartment blocks.”

Dimitriev goes on to explain that there are battles raging – between the Russian proxy ‘Donetsk and Luhansk republics’, the parts of the Russian Federation who formally ‘expressed the intention’ to help restore Donbas and “the Chechens” - for allocation of Russian state contracts.

In the meanwhile, residents have nothing to live on, with benefits, etc. provided by the Ukrainian state not available, and any Russian help thin on the ground. Even the (pitiful) 10 thousand roubles proposed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin “have largely vanished somewhere). Small-time business could have helped, but Russia can’t cope with that. One of the first things the invaders did after seizing Melitopol (Zaporizhzhia oblast) was to ban street vendors. In occupied Kherson, they appropriated goods, claiming their sale to be “illegal trading”.

Those, Dimitriev says, who “fantasize” about Ukraine falling this winter from the cold and from hunger should understand that it will not be Ukraine that suffers in the first instance.

few days later, Dimitriev returned to this subject, focusing specifically on Sievierodonetsk, one of the cities in the Luhansk oblast that Russia seized after mass bombing and shelling. He acknowledges that of more than 800 apartment blocks in Sievierodonetsk, most are damaged, with less than half able to be restored. There is no gas, nor heating. There is also no electricity or running water, though he says that “some percentage” of the blocks may be able to be connected to these services by the winter. One of the reasons for delay, he explains, is that there was a fight for Russian state contracts between people from Perm (Siberia) and Ingushetia. Residents are trying to insulate basements themselves, and are still cooking outside, with the Russian emergencies ministry erecting the same mobile ‘saunas’ (i.e. places to wash) as in Mariupol and other devastated cities.

All of this, it should be stressed, is fully in line with the reports and photos made public by the legitimate local authorities, and by commentators like Denis Kazansky (who first drew attention to Dimitriev’s posts). Nor is Dimitriev the first supporter of Russia’s aggression to have spelled out the truth. For a long time, Russia and its proxy ‘Luhansk republic’ [‘LPR’] claimed to have ‘liberated’ Popasna and promised to rebuild the city they had destroyed in this ‘liberation’ process. Then on 9 August, Kremlin-installed ‘LPR leader’ Leonid Pasechkin openly stated that “there is no particular point” to rebuilding it.

Moscow appears to have two, related, responses to the humanitarian catastrophe it has inflicted upon Ukraine. One is straight propaganda. Even before the invaders finally destroyed and seized all of Mariupol, they were erecting screens on which to broadcast propaganda. It is known also that the FSB has been forcing residents taken against their will to occupied Donbas or Russia to produce videos or sign ‘statements’ claiming that Ukrainian defenders committed Russia’s war crimes and bombed civilian targets.

Even Dimitriev noted a second, less effective, method in Russia’s propaganda campaign for its pseudo-referendum on joining Russia. It is particularly odd, he says, that the focus in this campaigning is on “historical unity”.

“A campaigner, some kind of ardent Moscow lad comes to the father of a family and says: “Would you like to discuss our Russian empire?”

He is answered: “Better to talk about deliveries of coal and food”.

The lad responds: “With respect to that, I can’t help. But in the Russian empire before the revolution, there were great deliveries of food and fuel!”

It remains to be seen whether Dimitriev finds himself arrested, either for ‘discrediting the Russian army’ or on some other, inexplicable, charge. Any other real reaction to the situation that he describes seems less probable.

- Source

#russian invasion of ukraine #fuck russkiy mir #russian imperialism is still imperialism

16 notes · View notes

if-you-fan-a-fire · 2 years

Photo

“Vera Iastrebova, a Donetsk lawyer and labor movement activist, reported on social media on February 26 that mothers and wives in the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” were desperately seeking ways to protect their menfolk from compulsory mobilization in the now-unfolding war.

“They call and say that the men are being taken from the [coal] mines and sent straight to the front, even though they have no military experience,” Iastrebova wrote.

Earlier in the week, activists in Ukrainian government–controlled territory had heard from their comrades in the “republics” that, since their militia had not conscripted sufficient soldiers, the over-fifty-fives were being called up.

Such realities stand in bleak contrast to the Kremlin’s rhetoric about the statelets as bastions of opposition to a “Nazi” regime.

The areas, known in Russian as Donetskaya Narodnaya Respublika (DNR) and Luganskaya Narodnaya Respublika (LNR), comprise the eastern part of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions respectively; the western parts have remained under Ukrainian government control even after 2014. Despite the “people’s republic” names, they have routinely intimidated organized labor and political dissidents, institutionalized violence, and trampled on human rights. They have also presided over the collapse of industry and a catastrophic fall in living standards.

The harsh conditions normalized since these statelets were founded in 2014 are not an exact guide to how Russian-supported forces, or Russia itself, might administer other parts of Ukraine if they take them over by force. But the misery heaped on the population of these “people’s republics” across the last eight years does give some indications.

Here, I shall focus first on the preparations for President Vladimir Putin’s announcement on February 21 that Russia recognizes the “republics,” followed on February 24 by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I then outline how the “republics”’ economies, politics, and labor movements have changed since their creation eight years ago.

The Run-Up to Recognition By the end of the 2014–15 war in Eastern Ukraine, extreme Russian nationalists’ aspirations to establish the state of Novorossiya, comprising Ukraine’s six southeastern regions, had been abandoned. Putin had referred to the idea in speeches in 2014 but then shelved it. The two “people’s republics” were to remain separate from each other and from Russia.

The Minsk II agreement of 2015 required Ukraine to decentralize and armed formations to withdraw, but neither happened, and at first Moscow appeared content to leave these statelets as they were, a thorn in the side of the Ukrainian state.

The first sign that the Kremlin’s policy was shifting toward recognition and/or integration was the drive, kick-started by two presidential decrees in mid-2019, to grant Russian citizenship to Russian-speaking Ukrainians, both in the “republics” and in Ukrainian-controlled territory. More than 800,000 passports have now been distributed — equivalent to more than one-third of the statelets’ remaining adult population.

A report by the Eastern Human Rights Group (EHRG), founded by trade union activists displaced from Donetsk to Ukrainian-controlled territory, concluded that “passportization” was part of a drive toward “permanent [Russian] control” of the “republics.” It went with militarization (specifically, the introduction of “military-patriotic” education in schools and sports clubs) and integration of the education system with Russia’s.

Prior to the 2021 parliamentary election in Russia, residents of the “republics” were encouraged to vote online or bused to polling stations in the Rostov region of Russia. Halya Coynash of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group reported that residents were being “enrolled en masse” into United Russia (UR), the dominant, pro-Putin party in the Russian parliament.

On Election Day last year, Dmitry Sablin, a leading UR parliamentarian, arrived in Donetsk and announced that an experiment was underway in “uniting this territory with Russia.” A barrage of similar sound-bites led observers to believe that the Kremlin was considering annexation, rather than recognition, of the “republics.”

The way for UR’s propaganda offensive had been paved by the Russian parliament’s loyal opposition parties, A Just Russia — for Truth (Spravedlivaya Rossiya — Za Pravdu, SRZP) and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), whose representatives had travelled to Donbas regularly since 2015. Sergey Mironov, former chairman of the Russian parliament’s upper house and leader of A Just Russia, a nominally social democratic but fiercely nationalist party, was an early advocate of integration of the “republics” with Russia. And it was CPRF deputies that last month made the motion in the Russian parliament — which UR then supported — urging Putin to recognize the “republics.” Two CPRF deputies have since protested against the war itself.

The promotion of the “Russian world” — which, in Putin’s view, includes swaths of Ukraine and other former Soviet states, as well as Russia itself — has a vicious side: the “republics” set their violent, arbitrary law enforcement agencies on Ukrainian speakers and supporters of the Ukrainian government. Top of a list of assaults on freedom of expression in 2019–21, compiled by the United Nations’ human rights agency, was the 13.5-year jail sentence handed to a Luhansk businessman who publicly expressed pro-Ukrainian views.

Three men arrested in 2020, for singing songs in Ukrainian, praising the Kiev government, and criticizing the Luhansk authorities, were still locked up without trial when the report was published in October 2021. The Luhansk “people’s republic” does not share information with the UN, and so their whereabouts remained unknown.

The slide toward integration has also heaped tragedy on residents of the “republics” who need to travel to Ukrainian government–controlled territory, including many social benefits recipients. Most crossing points across the separation line were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Local transport operators started offering trips via Russian territory; Ukrainian border officials were fining many people who made these journeys, until protests by community activists got the law changed.

From Powerhouse to Wasteland The Donbas (i.e., the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, of which the “republics” occupy parts) was, historically, a renowned center of coal mining, steelmaking, and chemicals production.

As Ukraine recovered from the disastrous economic slump that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Donbas economy leaned increasingly on exports of steel, coal, and railway locomotives. Russia remained its largest market. Other regions’ economies grew faster, benefiting in some cases from newer industries and services. But the 2014–15 war, and the division of the Donbas that followed, uprooted its population and trashed its industrial base.

By 2021, the war had claimed an estimated 14,000 lives, of which about four thousand were civilians, and left an estimated 30,000 injured. It dispersed much of the population of the Donbas: of a prewar population of 6.6 million, an estimated 3.3 million people have fled their homes. Of these, 1.8 million have been living as internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Ukraine and 1.5 million in Russia and Belarus. Whole towns and villages have been emptied of their populations.

And even before the Russian invasion this year, the UN categorized the Donbas as one of the world’s most mine-contaminated areas in the world.

In the first four years of conflict (2014–17), Donbas’s economy shrunk by 61 percent, the economist Vlad Mykhnenko found — largely due to “rapid and severe deindustrialization.” Luhansk’s industrial output fell by more than four-fifths, and Donetsk’s by half. Dozens of mines have closed and flooded, while small-scale, informal coal production has been de facto legalized. Steel works and manufacturing capacity lie idle.

Foreign trade collapsed, with Luhansk’s grinding almost to a halt and Donetsk’s falling by nearly two-thirds. What remains of the statelets’ economy is closely linked to Russia’s, and the ruble has been the main currency since 2015.

Living standards have crashed. Mykhnenko showed that in 2017 average wages in the Donetsk “people’s republic” were $174/month (38 percent of the pre-2014 level) and in the Luhansk “republic” $229/month (56 percent of the pre-2014 level). Nonpayment of wages is endemic.

Unemployment in the government-controlled parts of Donbas was 14-16 percent in 2018. No statistics were available for the “people’s republics,” but the level is similar. At the same time, there is a shortage of skilled labor, including medical staff, mine workers, and educators. Skilled workers leave if they can, a survey by the EHRG showed: labor migration to Russia is encouraged by the authorities.

Before 2014, much of Donbas heavy industry was controlled by the SKM financial group, whose owner, Rinat Akhmetov, is one of Ukraine’s richest politically influential businessmen (oligarchs). In February 2017, Ukrainian nationalists linked to Igor Kolomoisky, a competing oligarch, blockaded exports of Akhmetov’s coal from the “republics” to Ukraine. The action was opposed by organized labor.

The separatists’ armed forces responded by seizing Akhmetov’s assets, and — despite some rhetoric about “nationalization” — handed them to Vneshtorgservis (VTS), a company registered in South Ossetia, a Russian-occupied enclave in Georgia, and controlled by Serhiy Kurchenko, a billionaire linked to former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich. (In mid-2021, Kurchenko was replaced by Yevgeny Yurchenko.)

The cooperation between VTS and the political and military leadership of the “people’s republics,” as well as Russian elite circles, goes far beyond a “revolving-door” effect. Most observers see them as inseparable.

The sociologist Serhiy Kudelia wrote in 2017, “In reality, the ‘republics’ are beginning to acquire the features of a military bureaucratic regime, in which military personnel and officials dominate society through coercion and the monpolisation of the distribution of wealth.”

The economic disaster in the “people’s republics” cannot be attributed to their political leaderships alone; it is largely the product of war and recession. But it is a terrible fact of twenty-first-century capitalism that the economy could have been turned around, and the transition to new types of industry begun, with only a fraction of the resources that the Russian state is now plunging in to laying waste to Ukraine.

Labor and Authoritarian Control The militarized authorities in the “people’s republics” have drastically cut down space for social and political activity. A UN report concluded that there is no public discussion of “more sensitive political topics” due to “fear and self-censorship” and that protests over economic conditions, such as strikes, face “serious consequences, including arbitrary detention.”

Despite the statelets’ name, real popular involvement in politics faces sharp institutional limits. In the Donetsk “people’s republic,” military authorities in 2014 introduced a “nonparty democracy” (!). The “people’s council” wields political power and allows one legal party, the Communist Party of the Donetsk People’s Republic — although it excluded Communist Party representatives from its own ranks in 2016. Parliament is dominated by two “social movements,” with a high proportion of military commanders in their ranks. The researcher Kimitaka Matsuzato has shown how Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin power broker, worked with Donetsk officials to put the system together.

Organized workers’ action has been extremely rare in the “republics.” The most well-known action of recent years was an underground sit-in by 119 mine workers, over months’ worth of unpaid wages, at the Komsomolskaya mine in Antratsyt. Fourteen activists were arrested under article 252 of the statelet’s criminal code, which penalizes “repeated breach of established order, organization or conduct of assemblies, meetings, demonstrations, marches or pickets” with up to five years in prison. The dispute ended when they were released, and part of the outstanding wages were paid.

The public intimidation of civil society is backed up by a less transparent system of torture, humiliation, and forced labor in military prisons. The journalist Stanislav Aseyev, who spent thirty-one months in custody in Donetsk in 2017–19 and was released in a prisoner exchange, documented physical torture (electric shock treatment and beating of the genitals), rape of men and women, and other mistreatment, of himself and others.

The trade union activists of EHRG exposed the use of slave labor in Luhansk prisons in a 2016 report. Prisoners convicted under Ukrainian law before 2014 found themselves at the mercy of an extralegal regime that put prisoners to work in joinery and metalworking shops, and other production, without pay.

Prisoners who refused to work were severely beaten by armed, masked men; kept in solitary confinement with no food or water for three days; and forced by the threat of beating to stand for eight to ten hours in the burning sun. When prisoners protested collectively, guards called special detachments from the statelet’s internal affairs ministry to attack them.

Trade union activists and human rights defenders have mostly left the “people’s republics,” after a crackdown in 2014; those who stayed keep “low profiles in fear of persecution,” the UN report stated. Women’s rights organizations and support groups for victims of domestic violence, too, operate in the shadows.

Groups that have organized in the Ukrainian-controlled parts of the Donbas, and supported social movements in the “republics” when opportunities have arisen, include:

The EHRG, which has supported independent worker organization. Pavel Lisyansky, a lawyer with EHRG and former miners’ union official, said in a 2017 interview that the union structures approved by the “republics” had been “formed to control workers.” Worker militants in the “republics” have “no law, no rights, people are defenceless.”

The pacifist group Black Days of Donbas, set up by Enrike Menendez (a Donbas citizen of Spanish heritage). It demands that the Ukrainian government name a day to remember the civilian deaths of the war in Eastern Ukraine.

Women’s organizations, including: the Women’s Human Rights Group, formed in 2017 by Irina Nikulnikova, a lawyer, in response to anger over unpaid wages at the coal company Lisichanskugol; a group started by Vera Iastrebova that staged a march for women’s rights on International Women’s Day in 2018 at Lisichansk; and the Civil Inspection of Labor group, formed in 2014 in Debaltsevo to defend labor rights, social and economic rights, and women’s rights.

The Donbas “people’s republics” have, throughout their existence, been politically and militarily supported by the Russian government. Their economies are closely tied to Russia’s. Should Russia retain control of other parts of Ukraine, elements of this type of rule may be replicated.”

- Simon Pirani, “The Russian Statelets in the Donbas Are No “People’s Republics.” Jacobin. March 2, 2022.

#donetsk people's republic #lugansk people's republic #russia-ukraine war 2022 #russia-ukraine conflict #ukrainian civil war #ukrainian politics #russian imperialism #russian federation #authoritarian regime #analysis #donbas

2 notes · View notes

kragnir · 7 months

Link

This was a despicable crime, committed by despicable creatures, who are members of a despicable army from a despicable nation. I could never eat as much as I would like to vomit when I see such depraved crimes by the russians.

0 notes

jehovahsposts · 4 years

Photo

Halya Coynash: Heavy prison sentence against Russian Jehovah’s Witness. People attend the annual Jehovah's Witnesses assembly gathering 30.000 believers on July 22, 2011 in Villepinte, Paris suburb.

0 notes

ademocrat · 5 years

Link

#ukraine

0 notes

joelhar · 5 years

Text

Russian Twitter ‘false flag’ operation to blame Ukraine for MH17 broke all records

MH17 Pro-Russian Militants near the wreckage

16.05.2019 | Halya Coynash

Within the first two days after the downing of Malaysian airliner MH17 on 17July 2014, Russian Internet trolls had posted at least 65 thousand tweets trying to blame Ukraine for the disaster. This appears to have been a concentrated ‘false flag’ operation, but one that was already belated and, ultimately, pointless given the…

View On WordPress

#information operations #information warfare #Russia #Ukraine

0 notes

ciscaucasia · 5 years

Link

#Google News #North Caucasus #English

0 notes

untergangsshow · 6 years

Text

Russia arrests second historian of Stalin’s Terror

03.10.2018 | Halya Coynash for the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group

It is becoming dangerous in Russia to investigate the crimes of Stalinism. A second Karelian historian, Sergei Koltyrin has been arrested and is facing charges almost identical to those now brought against political prisoner, Yuri Dmitriev. While the possibility cannot be excluded that there are real grounds for these new charges, the chilling similarities between the two cases are of immense concern. So too is the timing, with this second arrest coming soon after Koltyrin publicly rejected attempts to rewrite history about the mass graves of victims of the Terror at Sandarmokh in Karelia.

The Investigative Committee report initially stated only that “two men are suspected of depraved actions committed to a minor” (Article 135 § 4 of Russia’s Criminal Code) and that these actions had allegedly been committed in September 2018. While on their site neither man is named, it is ominous that local media have as yet not identified the second person who, the Investigative Committee now asserts, has admitted to committing the acts.

The charges against Dmitriev have run up against insurmountable problems because of lack of evidence and the historian’s own denial of all the charges. Anybody following the cases of Russia’s Ukrainian political prisoners will be well aware of how many hinged solely on ‘confessions’ obtained while the men were held incommunicado and through torture.

Koltyrin has been the Director of the Medvezhyegorsk District Museum since 1991. His museum covers Sandarmokh, the clearing in Karelia where Dmitriev and other members of the Karelia branch of Memorial uncovered the mass graves of victims of the Terror. Among those buried at Sandarmokh were 1,111 prisoners of the notorious Solovki Labour Camp, including 289 Ukrainian writers, playwrights, scientists and other members of the intelligentsia, killed by quota from 27 October to 4 November 1937.

Koltyrin always worked very closely with Dmitriev and the Memorial researchers. The work at Sandarmokh, and its significance as a place of pilgrimage where each year International Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Great Terror were held, were initially fully supported by the Karelia authorities and even the FSB [security service].

Under President Vladimir Putin, the attitude to Joseph Stalin and to the darkest pages of Soviet history has changed dramatically. Over the last two years, no representatives of the authorities have taken part in remembrance events, and in August this year, Koltyrin himself was prevented from attending.

Koltyrin’s arrest comes just over a month after he made his opposition quite clear to contentious excavations by Russia’s Military History Society. This body was created by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December 2012, in order to “consolidate the forces of state and society in the study of Russia’s military-historical past and counter efforts to distort it”. It is headed by Russia’s Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, and has initiated such controversial moves as the creation of a museum and bust of Stalin in Khoroshevo (Tver oblast).

The excavations arose, purportedly, as a result of assertions made by two two historians from Petrozavodsk State University – Yuri Kilin and Sergei Verigin – six months in June 2016, six months before Dmitriev was first arrested.

They asserted that Sandarmokh could contain the graves of Soviet prisoners of war held in Finnish concentration camps and then killed during the Second World War. There was enthusiasm for such suggestions from pro-Kremlin media, with Izvestia immediately asserting that “Memorial’s information about repression in Karelia may be revised” Despite pleas from the descendants of those buried at Sandarmokh and the lack of any real evidence to justify such excavations, the work began on August 25 (more details here)

It was already difficult to separate these moves to rewrite history of Sandarmokh from the fatally flawed persecution of the man so instrumental in finding the graves and exposing the truth about both the victims and the perpetrators of those crimes.

Dmitriev was arrested on 13 December 2016 and charged with ‘preparing pornography involving a minor’ (Article 242.2 of Russia’s criminal code) and ‘depraved actions with respect to a child under the age of 11’ (Article 135). Both these apparently serious charges pertained solely to a folder filed on his computer, and never ‘circulated’, which contained 114 photos of his adopted daughter Natasha. The little girl had been painfully thin and in poor health at three years old, when he and his former wife took her from the children’s home, and the authorities had themselves advised him to monitor her development. Each of the photos, taken between 2008 and 2015 recorded her weight and height.

It was almost certainly hoped that the case, which apparently involved ‘child pornography’, would turn people away from Dmitriev and also discredit Memorial. It did nothing of the kind. The defence brought in proper experts, as opposed to the mathematician, teacher and art historian who obligingly perceived ‘pornography’ in nine of over 100 photos. They dismissed the allegations outright, finding no whiff of ‘pornography’ and confirming that it was common practice to take such photos for monitoring development.

It is possible that whoever had commissioned this prosecution decided to back off briefly in the face of such damning expert assessments and with worldwide publicity for the case. On 5 April 2018, Dmitriev was acquitted of the ‘pornography’ charges, however this acquittal was overturned on 14 June, and the case sent back for ‘retrial’.

The aim was clearly to imprison Dmitriev and on 27 June he was re-arrested, with the ‘investigators’ adding the charge of ‘violent acts of a sexual nature’. These alleged some kind of behaviour towards his adopted daughter up to when he was first arrested, but that had allegedly not been noticed before. It seems likely that the new charges have arisen in cooperation with Natasha’s grandmother who had not seen the little girl after leaving her in a children’s home as a toddler. Certainly Natasha herself was writing obviously loving letters to her father in prison and was clearly devastated by being taken from the only family she had ever known. Most importantly, in over a year and a half of trying to make an absurd prosecution convincing, the ‘investigators’ had come up with no other charges involving the little girl. Dmitriev remains in custody (more details here)

It was evident from within a month of Dmitriev’s first arrest that the case was aimed at discrediting Memorial and that this had been coordinated with the FSB. The charges had been chosen very deliberately to seem quite apolitical, while arousing aversion and anger, with many simply assuming that there must be some truth to them. That calculation has probably been made again. The arrest of Koltyrin soon after he rejected attempts to doctor the past with respect to Sandarmokh seems suspect, and concern is only exacerbated by attempts already reported in local media to link and discredit both highly respected and committed historians.

Update: On 3 October, Sergei Koltyrin and Yevgeny Nosov were remandedin custody until 27 November. The charges concern a 13-year-old. Interfax has asserted, citing an unnamed source, that Koltyrin has written a confession. As with all proceedings against Dmitriev, the prosecution is able to hold them behind closed doors because of the age of the alleged victim. Viktor Anufriev, who has represented Dmitriev from the beginning, will be representing Koltyrin as well. There appears to be no information about Nosov, except that he does not appear to have a lawyer.

#Sergei Koltyrin #Sandarmokh #Karelia #Great Terror #repressions #Stalinism

0 notes