The Russia Report

Issue 236

From the editor

A court in Vladimir Oblast this morning gave prison sentences for “extremism” to three lawyers who represented Alexei Navalny during his many trials and continued to assist him while he was in prison until his death in February last year. Vadim Kobzev, 41, got a 5 ½-year sentence, Alexei Liptser, 38, five years and Igor Sergunin, 46, 3 ½ years. A few independent journalists and a supporter of the lawyers who came to the trial were detained and released, and others applauded them after the sentences were handed down. The trial itself was held behind closed doors. Sergunin was the only one of the three who pled guilty.

Navalny’s three convicted lawyers in court in Vladimir Oblast after sentencing

The lawyers were jailed to await trial in October 2023, and were placed on Russia’s list of extremists and terrorists a month later. They were accused of “exploiting their status” to pass letters from Navalny to his associates when he was in prison, which according to prosecutors enabled him to continue in his role as the leader of a group that had been designated as extremist. Two other lawyers who represented Navalny, Olga Mikhailova and Alexander Fedulov, are wanted on the same charge but have escaped abroad.

Despite the ban on journalists attending the trial, Novaya Gazeta published the text of the “final word” speech that Kobzev gave in court on Jan. 10. He pointed out that the lawyers were accused of passing on Navalny’s idea to write about price rises in Russia, which was considered extremist. “Who knows, maybe in Russia in five to 10 years hundreds of people will be imprisoned for reporting price rises,” he said. “The future is unknown, but we know the past. We know that in Russian courts in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s people with the same serious faces were sending citizens to camps for expressing sceptical thoughts about the authorities… exactly the same thing that in our case is called ‘discrediting’ or ‘extremism’.

“We also know that then people with the same serious faces - and it happened that they were the same people - cancelled these sentences, throwing up their hands and saying in a low voice, ‘It was the times.’ Eighty years have passed, the story has entered another round, the state has once again changed its lenses, and in the Petushinsky court we are again tried for discrediting officials and government agencies. As a nation, we are marking time. We are stuck in an optician’s salon, where we try on all the glasses at random without bothering to look at the prescription in our pocket.” Kobzev then quoted Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Spark of Life in which a former WWII concentration camp guard claims he was only following orders, and said he hoped that the judge would not one day have to make the same excuse after reaching a verdict.

Russia does not appear to be anywhere near a point where it will “change its lenses” again and see reason. Also this week it was reported that former political prisoner Konstantin Kotov had fled house arrest and was in Lithuania. Kotov, 39, a software engineer from Moscow, was sentenced to four years in prison in September 2019 for participating in protests. After a public outcry he was released in December 2020. Most recently he was being held under house arrest to await trial for allegedly making six donations of 500 roubles ($5) to Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption. Kotov pled guilty but after cardiologist Ivan Tishchenko was sentenced to four years in prison for a small donation to Navalny’s organisation he decided to flee.

Meanwhile another former prisoner, 67-year-old journalist and human rights activist Alexander Skobov, gave his final word speech in a trial during which he has fervently expressed support for Ukraine. Skobov was confined in a psychiatric institution in the late 1970s and early ‘80s for his dissident activities. In April last year he was arrested and charged with justifying terrorism for posts about an attack on the bridge to occupied Crimea.

“All of my publicity activity has been a call to go and fight the aggressor that attacked Ukraine, to help with weapons and ammunition. And I take responsibility for every occupier who is destroyed,” Skobov told the court. “I don’t require mercy from my armed opponent,” he continued. “Putin’s dictatorship can kill me but it can’t force me to stop fighting it. Wherever I am I will continue to urge honest Russians to join the Ukrainian armed forces, and I will continue to call for strikes on military targets inside the territory of Russia. I will urge the civilised world to inflict a strategic defeat on Nazi Russia. I will try to prove the necessity of militarily defeating the regime of the new Hitler. I will not get tired of repeating, ‘Crush the bastard!’ Death to Putin, the murderer, tyrant and scoundrel! Death to the Russian-fascist invaders! Glory to Ukraine!” Skobov awaits his inevitable verdict and sentencing.

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Russia kills more civilians in Kryvyi Rih and Kherson Oblast; Ukraine strikes Russian targets

At least four people were killed and seven more were injured in a Russian strike on a college and residential buildings in Kryvyi Rih this morning. The death toll was expected to rise. A man whose second wife was killed there said his first wife and the mother of his three children had died in Kherson in 2022. Also this morning a Russian drone killed a man at a bus stop in Antonivka, Kherson Oblast. There were Russian drone strikes across Ukraine this week but Ukraine also heavily targeted Russia with drones. Russia’s 800,000-tonne fuel storage facility in Engels, Saratov Oblast has been on fire for four days after being hit by drones.

Sevastopol man sentenced for railway sabotage attempt, Tajik citizen for criticising war

A military court in Rostov-on-Don has sentenced Russian citizen Konstantin Gorpinchenko to 11 years in prison for allegedly attempting to set fire to two railway relay cabinets in occupied Sevastopol, Crimea, in October 2023 on the orders of Ukraine’s SBU. Gorpinchenko was accused of making contact with the SBU the previous month offering to work for Ukraine, and taking Molotov cocktails to the location of the relay cabinets, where he was caught. He was convicted of planning a terrorist attack.

A court in Novosibirsk has sentenced Tajik citizen Dalerdzhon Achilov, a butcher at a local market, to seven years in prison for “spreading fakes about the armed forces” after a sales assistant who worked with him informed authorities about their conversations. The assistant, named as Oksana P., has a son who is fighting in Ukraine. She told investigators that she was always arguing with Achilov because he “hates Russians and insults the Russian armed forces and participants in the Special Military Operation”. Authorities initially declined to prosecute but after the Crocus City Hall attack by terrorists from Tajikistan in March last year the head of Russia’s Investigations Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, personally intervened to initiate a criminal case.