Russia today tried to silence criticism of the military campaign in Ukraine by condemning veteran activist Oleg Orlov, co-founder of Memorial, an organization that received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.
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“Orlov's sentence is an attempt to silence the voice of the human rights movement in Russia and any criticism of the state”Memorial denounced in a statement.
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In the last two years of conflict There are already almost 20,000 detainees, 900 criminal cases and some 270 convicted in the framework of the repression campaign launched by the security forcesmany of them for controversial war laws such as discrediting the actions of the Army in Ukraine, according to OVD-Info.
Prison for septuagenarian dissident
The Golovinski Court in Moscow sentenced Orlov to 2 years and six months in prison on Tuesday, who was handcuffed in the same room and taken to prison by hooded officers.
The 70-year-old activist was convicted for the article “They wanted Fascism, they already have it” published in 2022 in the French press, a criticism that, in view of what has happened in recent monthsincluding the recent death in prison of the opponent Alexéi Navalni, did not exaggerate, in his words, “not one bit.”
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The Prosecutor's Office accused Orlov, who also demonstrated in Red Square against the war in Ukraine, of harboring hatred against the Russian army and animosity against the traditional moral principles and patriotic values professed by the Kremlin.
“They accuse us of discrediting (the Armed Forces), without explaining what it is about and how it differs from legitimate criticism. They accuse us of intentionally disseminating false information without bothering to prove its falsehood. This is precisely how the authorities behaved by calling any criticism a lie,” Orlov said the day before when pronouncing his last words.
They accuse us of discrediting (the Armed Forces), without explaining what it is about and how it differs from legitimate criticism.
Orlov felt identified with the character in the novel “The Trial” by Franz Kafka – a book that he reread during the hearings and gave to his lawyer – since he also does not understand why and what he is being accused of.
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“The State in our country once again controls not only social, political and economic life, but also It aspires to total control of culture and scientific thought, and invades private life. It becomes absolute“, said.
Clear memory
Memorial immediately condemned the sentence against one of its leaders, whom it described as “one of the most consistent opponents of aggression in Ukraine” and recalled that Orlov saved the lives of many Russian soldiers and civilians during the two wars in Chechnya.
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“Orlov is a Russian patriot (…). But in today's Russia everything is upside down: war is peace and calls for peace are a crime”he assured on Telegram.
Furthermore, he denounced that the article of the penal code that condemns “the discredit of the Russian Armed Forces” is, in reality, an attempt at “censorship”, whose purpose is “to persecute people for opinions that differ from the official ones.”
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.
The ruling coincided with the ninth anniversary of the assassination near the Kremlin of the opposition leader and former Russian deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov.
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In December 2021, the Russian courts liquidated both Memorial International and the Memorial Human Rights Center for creating a “false image of the USSR as a terrorist state”, after which said organization received the Nobel Peace Prize a year later in Oslo.
Putin, second only to Stalin
According to the investigative media Proekt, the magnitude of the repression since 2018 is only surpassed by a Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, accused by Memorial of ordering the shooting of hundreds of thousands of people and sending several million more to the GULAG.
Project figure in 116,000 have been retaliated against since 2018 – when the fourth term of the current head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, began, of which 11,442 were for criminal reasons.
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The Russian authorities would have prosecuted more people for extremism and criticism of power (5,613) than the Soviet authorities for anti-Soviet propaganda during the mandates of Nikita Khrushchev (4,883) and Leonid Brezhnev (3,234).
In addition, according to the investigation, almost 6,000 cases came to court for crimes against the State and for refusing to fight in Ukraine.
EFE
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