Conflicts & War

Russia silences dissent with conviction of Ukraine war critic

Moscow, Feb 27 (EFE).- Veteran Russian activist Oleg Orlov was sentenced to two and a half years in prison on Tuesday, as Russian authorities continue to clamp down on dissent and silence any domestic criticism of the Kremlin’s military campaign in Ukraine.

“Orlov’s sentencing is an attempt to silence the voice of the human rights movement in Russia and any criticism of the state,” Memorial, the organization Orlov co-founded which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, denounced in a statement.

His sentencing comes in the wake of the apparently sudden death of Alexei Navalny, a prominent critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who died in an Arctic prison colony on Feb. 16.

Navalny’s representatives and several Western nations have accused Russian authorities of deliberately instigating the opposition leader’s death.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine just over two years ago, nearly 20,000 people have been arrested, 900 criminal cases have been tried and some 270 people have been convicted as part of the crackdown launched by Russian security forces, many of them for discrediting the actions of the army in Ukraine, OVD-Info monitoring group reports.

The 70-year-old activist was convicted by Moscow’s Golovinsky Court for writing an article titled “They wanted Fascism, they got it” published in 2022 in the French press.

The Prosecutor’s Office accused Orlov, who also demonstrated on Red Square against the war in Ukraine, of harboring hatred against the Russian military and animosity against the traditional moral principles and patriotic values promoted by the Kremlin.

“They accuse us of smearing (the Armed Forces), without explaining what it is and how it differs from legitimate criticism. They accuse us of intentionally spreading false information without bothering to prove its falsity. This is exactly how the Soviet authorities behaved, calling any criticism a lie,” Orlov said on Monday.

Orlov identified himself with the character in Franz Kafka’s novel “The Trial” – a book he reread during the hearings and gave to his lawyer – as he too does not understand why and what he is accused of.

“The state in our country again controls not only social, political and economic life, but aspires to total control of culture and scientific thought, and invades private life. It becomes absolute,” he said.

Memorial immediately condemned the sentence against one of its leaders, whom it described as “one of the most consistent detractors of aggression in Ukraine” and recalled that Orlov saved the lives of many Russian soldiers and civilians during the two wars in Chechnya.

“Orlov is a Russian patriot (…). But in today’s Russia everything is upside down: war is peace and calls for peace are a crime,” the group said on Telegram.

The article in the criminal code condemning “the discrediting of the Russian Armed Forces” is actually an attempt at “censorship”, the purpose of which is “to persecute people for opinions that differ from official ones,” the group said.

More than a dozen Western diplomats, including representatives of the United States and the European Union, attended the hearing in the Russian capital on Tuesday.

In a statement, the European Union’s head of foreign and security policy, Josep Borrell, said the EU was “appalled” by Orlov’s sentencing.

Calling the charges “clearly politically motivated”, the EU called “on the Russian authorities to immediately and unconditionally release all political prisoners and to abandon their oppressive legislation used to suppress civil society and independent voices.”

The ruling coincided with the ninth anniversary of the assassination near the Kremlin of opposition leader and former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov.

In December 2021 Russian courts liquidated both Memorial International and the Memorial Human Rights Center for creating a “false image of the USSR as a terrorist state.”

The organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo a year later.

According to the investigative media outlet Proyekt, the scale of repression under Putin since 2018 is surpassed only by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who ordered the execution of hundreds of thousands of people and sent several million more to the GULAG prison colony system.

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