On Tuesday, a military court in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don sentenced a Ukrainian film director to 20 years in a maximum-security prison after convicting him of terrorism. In the hours after the verdict, small groups of people came out to protest in front of Russian consulates and embassies in several countries. In Tel Aviv, two young people held up signs marked with three words: two obscenities and a Russian word for “idiots.” They probably best expressed the sense of gaping-mouth and helpless rage felt by all the people who had been following the Sentsov case.
Oleg Sentsov, 39, was arrested in May of last year in Crimea, which had been annexed by Russia less than two months earlier.… Seguir leyendo »
Thirty-five years ago, on Jan. 22, 1980, Andrei Sakharov was detained by KGB agents on a Moscow street and packed off to Nizhny Novgorod, then called Gorky. The decision to send the human rights defender and winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize into internal exile came as relations with the West deteriorated after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan a month earlier. Today, history is being repeated as the Russian government mounts a legal attack on human rights and civic organizations — including an institution created to preserve Sakharov’s legacy — at a time when Moscow’s relations with the world are strained by its involvement in a war in neighboring Ukraine.… Seguir leyendo »
Russia has been producing so much bad news of late that a lot of it has passed without notice. The implosion of the Russian currency and the sham trial and questionable sentencing of the Putin opponent Aleksei A. Navalny and his brother Oleg have overshadowed less suspenseful stories — such as the designation of several nongovernmental organizations as “foreign agents,” the departure of the country’s leading economist from his academic post, and new attacks on the remaining scraps of independent media. And those were the latest battles for the hearts, minds and memories of the Russian people.
As the year wrapped up, the cabinet filed a bill in Parliament proposing to create a federally mandated list of the broadcasters to be carried by every cable provider.… Seguir leyendo »
Over the past year Triumphal'naya Ploshchad, a downtown square in the Russian capital, has become the site of standoffs between the government and a small political group called Strategy 31. On the last day of each month with 31 days, the group stages a rally to demand that the government observe Article 31 of the constitution, which grants Russians freedom of assembly. Each of the eight times these protests have been held -- commonly drawing a few hundred people -- the gathering, and the constitution, have been trampled by the authorities.
A high-ranking Kremlin aide has acknowledged that even small signs of opposition make the Kremlin jittery.… Seguir leyendo »
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