On Tuesday, April 12, 2022 at 11:35:50 AM UTC-7, David P. wrote:
> ‘We Will Kill You’: How Russia Silenced Its Antiwar Movement
> By Evan Gershkovich, Apr. 6, 2022
>
> Alexander Teplyakov wanted to speak out against the war
> in Ukraine but feared landing in prison if he took part in
> a public protest. So the Russian activist designed an antiwar
> sticker featuring Russian and Ukrainian flags and the phrase
> “NO TO WAR” & posted & distributed thousands of them around Moscow.
>
> He got into trouble anyway. Russian police hauled the 23-year-old
> into the Presnensky district police station on March 1, according
> to a copy of his police records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
> Teplyakov said he was repeatedly beaten over the head by one officer
> while in custody. A second officer pressed a pistol to his leg and
> coerced him into divulging the name of a fellow activist, he added.
>
> “He starts screaming at me to start writing,” Teplyakov said in a
> phone interview. He said the police officer threatened him, saying,
> “We will kill you right now.”
>
> Teplyakov was sentenced to 10 days in jail after being convicted
> on a charge of disobeying the police, according to a copy of a
> court ruling. He left for Tbilisi, Georgia, the day after he was
> released from custody—joining tens of thousands of Russians who
> have fled the crackdown on dissent and the fallout of economic
> sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
>
> A new Russian law prohibiting referrals to the military campaign
> in Ukraine as a war or an invasion and mass arrests of protesters
> have largely eliminated visible signs of dissent inside Russia
> against the war. Large numbers of Russians opposed to the war
> have chosen to be exiled.
>
> The Kremlin has welcomed the departures of critics.
> “Many people are showing themselves to be what we in Russia
> like to call traitors,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said
> in mid-March. “They disappear from our lives on their own. Some
> resign from their jobs, some withdraw from their professional
> lives, and some leave the country and move to other places.
> That’s how Russia is cleansed.”
>
> The Kremlin can count on the support of many Russians. Putin’s
> approval rating rose to 83% at the end of March, from 71% a
> few days before Russian troops moved into Ukraine, according to
> independent Russian pollster Levada Center.
>
> What began as a robust protest movement in Russia, with 1000s
> of activists taking part in protests or handing out antiwar
> literature, has now faded. The last major antiwar rally was on
> March 13, and the streets have been mostly quiet since. Small
> protests broke out and around 200 protesters were detained in
> several cities on Sunday after revelations emerged about potential
> war crimes in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, according to the OVD-Info,
> an independent rights group.
>
> Over 15,000 antiwar protesters have been arrested since the
> start of the invasion, OVD-Info said, and 900 of them have
> received jail sentences averaging 10 days. Independent Russian
> media has carried accounts of mistreatment of detainees and of
> people who say they were fired from their jobs for speaking out.
>
> “They’ve instilled strong fear in people,” Maria Kuznetsova,
> OVD-Info’s spokeswoman, said.
> Russia’s Interior Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.
>
> Authorities have launched 8 criminal cases under the new law
> that forbids the use of the words war or invasion to describe
> the conflict in Ukraine, said Damir Gainutdinov, head of the Net
> Freedoms Project, a nonprofit rights group. Among those charged
> include journalists, government employees, a style blogger and a
> 63-year-old pensioner living outside the Siberian city of Tomsk
> with 170 followers on her Telegram channel.
>
> Net Freedoms Project has also tracked over 200 cases of Russians
> charged—under an older law—with discrediting Russia’s armed forces,
> a violation carrying a fine of up to 1 million rubles, equivalent
> to almost $12,000. Repeat offenders risk landing in prison for up
> to 3 years.
>
> One 25-year-old woman said that when she was detained at a
> Moscow police station after participating in an antiwar demo, a
> police officer said he'd put her in a cell and allow other prisoners
> to rape her. The Journal reviewed a copy of her arrest record.
>
> A rep of the police station said he wasn’t authorized to comment.
> The Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, didn’t respond
> to requests for comment.
>
> “He said that we don't deserve to live in this country, that it’s
> time for us to get out of here, that in Russia nothing will change,
> Putin will always be in power, we are traitors,” the woman said.
> She was one of 3,400 people across the country arrested on March 6
> for protests, according to the Interior Ministry.
>
> In Vladivostok, a port city on Russia’s Pacific coast, Anastasia
> Kotlyar is scheduled to be tried by a court in mid-April on charges
> of violating Russia’s protest laws and refusing to cooperate with
> the police. She said she and her boyfriend plan to then leave the
> country as soon as possible.
>
> Kotlyar was arrested on March 13, according to a copy of police
> records reviewed by the Journal. During her interrogation, she
> said a police officer slammed her head on the table. She suffered
> a concussion and spent six days at Vladivostok’s Clinical Hospital
> No. 2, according to a copy of her med report reviewed by the Journal.
>
> The report said Kotlyar was “injured while being detained.” Reached
> by phone, the hospital confirmed that Kotlyar had been hospitalized
> there. Vladivostok’s police department didn’t respond to multiple
> requests for comment. The Interior Ministry didn’t respond to
> requests for comment.
>
> The 25-year-old activist, who helped Russian opposition leader
> Alexei Navalny organize antigovernment rallies in her hometown
> in recent years, said she has been fined and detained repeatedly
> for violating Russia’s protest laws and thinks it is now too
> dangerous for her to stay in the country.
>
> Kamran Manafly, a 28-year-old teacher at Moscow’s School No. 498,
> posted on Instagram that he would stand by his antiwar views after
> his school instructed teachers to push the government line on the
> war in Ukraine. “I don’t want to be a mirror of state propaganda,”
> he wrote on March 8.
>
> Two hours later, he got a call from the school’s director, Tamara
> Gorodzeyko, a Moscow city councilor, telling him to take the post
> down or quit. He was fired three days later, according to a copy
> of his dismissal letter reviewed by the Journal, for committing
> an “immoral offense.”
>
> Manafly, who's since left Russia, said that 2 years ago Gorodzeyko
> told him she was proud of him for having gone to the U.S. to
> apprentice at a school there.
>
> “It was a different country. Now you feel it in the educational
> system, in lessons. It’s becoming totalitarian,” Manafly said.
>
> Moscow’s School no. 498 and Gorodzeyko didn’t respond to requests for comment.
>
> There are other factors that explain why the protest movement
> fizzled out. State control over the airwaves allowed the govt to
> sell its narrative, which depicts the Russian military as liberating
> Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine from nationalists. Levada on
> Thursday published a poll showing that 81% of Russians back the
> military campaign, but it also found that 35% are paying
> “practically no attention” to the war.
>
> The govt also spent last year dismantling Russia’s already
> embattled opposition. Authorities jailed Navalny for 3.5 years,
> banned his organizations as “extremist,” and closed several other
> opposition networks. In late March, a court extended Navalny’s
> prison sentence by another 9 years. All of his top lieutenants
> have been jailed or have fled the country.
>
> “Putin deliberately destroyed all structures that could have
> built these kinds of collective actions. Now it’s clear he did
> this because he was preparing for war,” said Greg Yudin, a
> political scientist at the Moscow School of Social and
> Economic Sciences.
>
> Not all antiwar activists are fleeing.
> Dmitry Ivanov, the activist who Teplyakov identified as helping
> distribute antiwar stickers, said that while police officers
> haven’t approached him he understands the risks of staying in
> Russia. The 22-year-old student at Moscow State U. said the
> letter Z—which in Russia has become a symbol of support of the
> war—was recently spray painted on his front door. This claim
> couldn’t be independently verified, but dozens of opposition-
> minded people have reported similar acts of vandalism since
> the start of the invasion.
>
> Ivanov said he's focusing his efforts not on protesting but
> on private conversations with friends, colleagues, relatives
> and neighbors. He believes it will take time for real info
> about the war to bubble to the surface, saying facts such as
> the true fatality toll of Russia’s soldiers will become clear
> only in coming months. While Russia has said 1,351 of its
> soldiers have died in the fighting, the U.S. has estimated
> that as many as up to 7,000 Russian troops have been killed.
>