Политический контекст

Показательные процессы Путина

There are no mass executions anymore, but since the first term of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (°1952) as a president, the Russian Federation has got again the phenomenon of Show Trials. Before becoming president, Putin had made a career at the secret police of the Soviet Union. From 1985 to 1990, he has been working in Dresden in the former German Democratic Republic, as a KGB officer in charge of the interrogation and internment of dissidents and «Western spies who wanted to invade the Soviet Union». Just before he became a minister in the government of Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin (1931-2007) in 1999, he was the head of the Федеральная служба безопасности Российской Федерации (ФСБ) [Federalnaya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii] (FSB) or Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, the successor of the KGB.

As president, Putin showed that he had mastered the techniques of the old KGB. He showed this for the first time with the trials against Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky (°1963) and Platon Leonidovich Lebedev (°1956), the former owners of the Yukos oil company .

KGB officer Vladimir Putin

Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev

The oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had become Russia's richest man in the 1990s, had made himself known for his criticism of the corruption in the Russian state system. In addition, he also campaigned for greater openness in government through his citizens' movement Открытая Россия [Otkrytaya Rossiya] or Open Russia, and actively supported various liberal-democratic opposition parties in the run-up to the 2004 Russian parliamentary elections.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

In February 2003, during a televised meeting in the Kremlin, Khodorkovsky had taken the opportunity to address Putin publicly about corruption. He had said that key government officials collected millions in bribes and showed a PowerPoint presentation detailing the cost of corruption to the Russian economy. On October 25, 2003 Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev were arrested on suspicion of tax evasion, fraud and embezzlement. Yukos was virtually dismantled, with the most profitable parts falling to Rosneft, an oil company led by Igor Ivanovich Setshin (°1960). Setshin is a former KGB spy and one of Vladimir Putin's most conservative advisers. He was Deputy Prime Minister in Putin's cabinet and leader of the Комманда Силовиков [Kommanda Silovikov] or The Men of Power, a lobby of former KGB agents - and therefore friends of Putin - in the Kremlin.

Platon Lebedev

In an attempt to reduce the public interest for the trial, it was held in the less significant Meshchansky district court in Moscow. Behind the scenes, however, the Kremlin and the Moscow City Court, the supreme court of the city of Moscow, played a guiding role. On May 31, 2005, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were convicted for tax evasion and fraud to 9 years of imprisonment. On September 22, 2005, in a session of one day, the verdict was upheld on appeal, the sentence was reduced to 8 years.

Since there was a reasonable chance that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev would be released on parole before the presidential elections of 2012, and thus possibly could disrupt Putin's second presidential election, new «allegations» emerged, and a second trial against them was staged. This time they were accused of the theft of 350 million tons of oil. Besides the fact that this is physically rather impossible, it appeared that judge Viktor Nikolaevich Danilkin (°1957) was regularly «adjusted» by the Kremlin during the trial. Danilkin struggled with the sometimes absurd accusations and had to be regularly «updated».

Judge Viktor Danilkin reads the verdict

Natalya Vasilyeva, the assistant of judge Danilkin, testified on February 14, 2011, that the judge had prepared his verdict to be delivered on December 16, 2010. On December 15, however, the deliverance was postponed for unknown reasons to December 27. On December 16, it became clear why. That day, Putin delivered a controversial speech in which he said that Khodorkovsky was a thief and therefore should be stay in prison. Vasilyeva testified that the original judgment of Danilkin had been changed and that he had delivered the new verdict against his will. As a result of this adjusted verdict, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev could not be released before August 2014.

In 2011, the then Russian President Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev (°1965) asked the Kremlin Human Rights Council to investigate the Khodorkovsky case further. The Council concluded that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were innocent. It did not lead to a release, though. On the contrary, the nine members of the Council were accused of being bribed. Five of them were the subject of interrogations and prosecutions. Some lost their jobs or had to move abroad. In addition, a third case against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev was being prepared.

In the run up to the Olympic Winter Games of 2014 in Sochi, a project in which Putin wanted to shine in the eyes of the world, many world leaders had announced that they would not attend the ceremonies. Real reasons were not given, but it was clear that the way in which human rights were violated in Russia was at the basis of it. Especially the arrest of 30 Greenpeace activists a few months earlier, the Khodorkovsky case and the Russian anti gay law were an eyesore. On December 17, 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama said he would not come himself to Sochi. As members of the delegation which would represent him, he appointed two notorious gay people: tennis legend Billie Jean King (°1943) and hockey player Caitlin Cahow (°1985). According to the American-Russian journalist Masha Gessen, Putin loomed for the specter to see himself accompanied by «only the Ukrainian president and two American gays» at the opening of his personal prestige project. On December 19, 2013, Putin unexpectedly announced that Mikhail Khodorkovsky could be released, which happened the next day. On December 20, 2013, Khodorkovsky arrived as a free man in Berlin. According to Putin, he can freely return to Russia, but whether that will ever happen is doubtful, as the investigations for a possible third trial have not been put on hold.

Two days later, the Radio Svoboda channel published an article on its website entitled Dossier Putin. In that file it was stated that the release of Khodorkovsky would have come about under pressure from the German government. The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), one of Germany's three secret services, had evidence that Putin, when he was still deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg, had close ties with the Russian mafia through the Sankt Petersburg Immobilien und Beteiligungs AG (SPAG), a company registered in Germany, which had made fortunes through illegal practices. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel (°1954) is said to have used this information as a means of pressure for the release of Khodorkovsky. After all, Putin was closely involved with SPAG. He has served on the company's advisory board since its founding in 1992. One of the shady practices involved the mysterious disappearance of a ton of seized cocaine at the hands of Viktor Vasilyevich Cherkesov (1950-2022), who was then director of the FSB in Saint Petersburg.

Виктор Черкесов показывает пропавший потом кокаин

On January 23, 2014, the Russian Supreme Court also reduced Platon Lebedev's sentence and ordered his release from prison. But Supreme Court judge Pyotr Serkov (°1955) did not change a previous court order ordering Khodorkovsky and Lebedev to pay 17 billion rubles (300 million euros) in back taxes. Immediately after his release, Lebedev said in an interview with Ren TV that he intended to resume business

On July 28, 2014 Russia was condemned by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague for the way Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev and Yukos were treated. Besides the fact that Russia was sentenced to a very severe damages of 50 billion USD, the Court was also very hard in its motivation. The dismantling of Yukos was politically motivated, with the aim to push the company towards bankruptcy to take its assets and transfer them to state owned enterprises and to silence politically the CEO of the company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

It is the largest ever compensation awarded by the Court in The Hague: it is 20 times larger than the second largest, and does not even take into account complaints from minority shareholders whose files have yet to be examined.

The consequences for Russia were huge: the sum was 11 % of the country's national currency reserves and 10 % of the government budget. Also, there would be consequences for Rosneft, the energy giant which got most of Yukos' assets, and of which the oil company BP (British Petroleum) had become a minority shareholder. The Russians had to show the money before January 2, 2015. Since they didn't, interests started running. Although Russia can not appeal against the verdict, the Kremlin said they will try to use «all means to undo it». According to the 1958 Arbitration Convention, Russia is now risking the seizure of all Russian assets in 150 countries to execute the sentence.

In Putin's entourage, no one was in the least concerned. One of the people from his inner circle told the Financial Times that the verdict was unimportant in the light of the geopolitical issues with Ukraine: «There will be war in Europe. Do you really think that this case is of any importance?»

On September 20, 2014, Mikhail Khodorkovsky relaunched Open Russia during an online conference. The organisation aims to bring together citizens living both inside and outside of Russia, who share the European values of a strong, dynamic, and forward-looking state founded upon effective democratic institutions and the rule of law.

In 2008, Khodorkovsky maintained a correspondence from his cell with the famous Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya. In candid and revealing letters, Khodorkovsky discussed his life in prison, where he got his power, and what his life was like as an oligarch. Your webmaster translated their letters into English, French and Dutch. You can read them via the link below

Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Aleksey Navalny

Another opponent of Vladimir Putin, the famous blogger Alexey Anatolievich Navalny (1976-2024), was also skillfully eliminated. Navalny, who was named Person of the Year by the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti in 2009, was known for his blogs and some initiatives of civil emancipation. One of his strategies, for example, existed in becoming minority shareholder in several major Russian state-owned enterprises. As a shareholder, he hoped to get information which would enable him to make the financial assets and the financial structure of these companies more transparent. Navalny was arrested and sentenced several times to a couple of weeks in prison for participating in demonstrations.

Alexey Anatolievich Navalny

On July 10, 2013, when he was going to register as a candidate for mayor of the city of Moscow, Navalny was arrested under the eyes of many spectators and the press. On July 17, his candidacy was formally accepted. The next day however, on July 18, 2013, he was sentenced to five years of prison camp on a trial in the city of Krilov. The indictment was even absuder than in the case of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. According to the judge, Navalny would have sold 10.000 cubic meters of wood of the state owned company KirovLes far under its value when he was an adviser to Nikita Yurevich Belych (°1975), the governor of the Kirov oblast in 2009. By doing so, he would have pinched 400,000 euros. The verdict of the court corresponded word for word to the accusation of the prosecutor, except for the punishment. The prosecutor had demanded six years in a labour camp.

On the evening of the verdict, thousands of people gathered in the streets of Moscow and other large cities in Russia, despite the formal ban on demonstrations. Due to those meetings, and also perhaps as a result of international pressure, a surprising news came out of the blue the next day, on July 19, 2013: on the initiative of the prosecutor, Navalny was released on bail. He was free again to await the appeal decision.

It is suggested that, with the release, the Russian government wanted to offer Navalny a last opportunity to escape. Journalist and human rights activist Alexandr Pinkhosovich Podrabinek (°1953), co-signatory of the so-called Prague Declaration, suggested on the website of the Institute of Modern Russia that the authorities have missed the moment that Navalny could be murdered without publicity. The Kremlin would like to see him emigrate. They would therefore like that he tried to escape from the court by seeking political asylum somewhere, in which case he could not return to Russia unpunished.

In February 2014, Alexey Navalny and his brother Oleg Anatolievich (°1984) were prosecuted on embezzlement and money laundering charges following a complaint by Bruno Leproux, general director of the Russian subsidiary of the French cosmetics and beauty brand Yves Rocher. The prosecution claimed they had embezzled over 26,7 million rubles or 540,000 USD from the Russian subsidiary Yves Rocher Vostok between 2008 and 2012. Despite the fact that Yves Rocher France denied that they had any losses, Navalny was placed under house arrest on February 28, 2014, and prohibited from communicating with anyone other than his family, after allegedly violating travel restrictions.

Oleg Anatolievich Navalny

Then followed two surprising events. First, the sentence was scheduled originally to be read on January 15, 2015. Sympathisers had planned demonstrations in many cities on that day. Not only in Russia, but in many cities in Europe and the United States, Navalny supporters had planned actions at the doors of shops and offices of Yves Rocher, but on December 29, 2014, the judge suddenly announced that she was to read the sentence the next day, on December 30, 2014. The second surprise was that Alexei Navalny got only 3,5 years of suspended sentence, whereas his brother Oleg was sentenced to 3,5 years in prison and was arrested after the sentence was read. It looks like, by punishing Alexey's brother harder, the Russian authorities wanted to put additional psychological pressure on the Navalny family in another attempt to silence them.

But Navalny did not remain silent, and he was further harassed. In 2018, he became partially blind in one eye after a chemical was thrown in his face.In July 2019, while in prison following a conviction for incitement to protest, he was admitted to a hospital in Moscow due to a poisoning.

On August 20, 2020, Navalny, en route from Tomsk to Moscow by plane, had to be taken again to the intensive care unit of a hospital in Omsk. The incident caused international commotion and raised questions from government leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. After the hospital in Omsk initially noticed no symptoms of poisoning and refused to let him go to Germany for further treatment, he was transferred to Berlin on August 22. There, the doctors discovered that he had been poisoned with novichok, a nerve poison developed by the Soviet Union at the time. It would be much stronger than other nerve toxins such as sarin and would be more difficult to combat with atropine. It is a very deadly weapon that is certainly not available everywhere and that brings the suspicion very much to the Russian government.

On January 17, 2021, Navalny returned to Russia and was immediately arrested upon his arrival. The reason given was that he would have violated the terms of his suspended sentence in the case of Yves Rocher. He was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison.

Two days later, Navalny's Anti-Corruption Organisation published a report on an estate that Vladimir Putin is having built for himself near Gelendzhik on the Black Sea, on a property of some 70 square kilometers. The domain is 39 times the size of Monaco and it costed more than 1.5 billion dollars to build. Navalny's video showed aerial footage of the estate made by a drone and a detailed floor plan of the palace. One of the questions that Navalny asks himself is how Putin can afford such a palace with an official annual wage of 8,885,886 rubles or 74,641 euros per year.

Putin's palace near Gelendzhik

On June 29, 2021, the entire organisation surrounding Navalny's activities was classified as extremist and disbanded.

In February 2022, Alexei Navalny faced an additional 10 to 15 years in prison in a new trial for fraud and contempt of the court. The prosecution alleged that he stole 4.7 million dollar in donations from his political organisations. He was tried in a makeshift courtroom in the IK-2 penal colony where he was imprisoned. However, on February 21, Fyodor Gorozhanko, a former Navalny team member, refused to testify against him. He said he did not believe Navalny had committed any crimes. Three days later, at his trial, Navalny criticised the Russian invasion of Ukraine and asked the court to include his statement in the trial protocol. On March 22, 2022, Judge Margarita Nikolaevna Kotova handed down a sentence of 9 years. She had been promoted four days earlier, but was unable to get the new job until after Navalny's conviction

In August 2023, Nalvalny was sentenced again, this time to 19 years in prison. The ruling was made in a court hundreds of miles outside of Moscow to give Navalny as little publicity as possible. He was charged, among other things, with «founding an extremist movement». The total sentence that Navalny had to serve increased thus to 30 years. Navalny was transferred to IK-6 prison in Melechovo, 150 kilometers east of Moscow. This is a highly secured facility where, according to an ex-detainee, torture and sexual abuse have regularly taken place in 2021.

On December 5, 2023, he disappeared without a trace. On January 10, 2024, he reappeared on social media and said he had been transferred to the Penal Colony IK-3 in Kharp, near the Arctic Circle. On February 17, 2024, the prison reported that he had died that day at 14:17 local time.

Vladimir Bukovsky

Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky 1942-2019) was one of the first to publicise the use of psychiatric imprisonment as a measure against political prisoners in the Soviet Union. He himself spent 12 years in prisons, labour camps and psikhushkas.

Boekovski begon reeds op jonge leeftijd te rebelleren. Hij was amper 17 jaar oud toen hij in 1959 in Moskou van school werd gestiuurd voor het oprichten en leiden van een «ongeautoriseerd blad», maar hij is wellicht het meest bekend voor zijn acties tegen de psychiatrische instellingen in de Sovjet-periode.

Vladimir Bukovsky

In 1970 Bukovsky came into contact with correspondent Bill Cole (1922-2006) from the American television channel CBS. Under the pretext of a family trip with his wife and children and some friends, he went for a picnic in the woods outside Moscow. The KGB remained in the background, watching them from a distance. Bukovsky managed to prevent the officers from seeing him while Bill Cole was filming an interview with him. During that interview, he described how the Soviet government imprisoned political dissidents in mental institutions and subjected them to experimental treatments with various drugs. Together with the interview, Bukovsky also managed to smuggle more than 150 pages out of the country. It further documented the political abuse of psychiatric institutions in the Soviet Union. The interview was smuggled out of the country by Canadian diplomats and broadcast by CBS under the title Voices from the Soviet Underground.

The interview and information that Bukovsky had collected and sent to the West set human rights activists around the world and within the Soviet Union thinking. Bukovsky was arrested on March 29, 1971, and in January 1972 he was sentenced to two years in prison, five years in a labour camp, and five more years in internal exile.

In December 1976 Bukovsky was deported from the Soviet Union to be exchanged at Zurich Airport for Luis Corvalán (1916-2010), the General Secretary of the Communist Party imprisoned in Chile. Bukovsky moved to the United Kingdom and settled in Cambridge, where he continued his studies in biology, which he had interrupted fifteen years earlier. He organised and supported all kinds of anti-communist initiatives.

In April 1991, Vladimir Bukovsky returned to Moscow for the first time since his deportation. Leading up to the 1991 presidential election, Boris Yeltsin's campaign staff considered Bukovsky a potential vice presidential candidate, but that idea was not carried out. In 2002 he met Boris Nemtsov in Cambridge to discuss the strategy of the Russian opposition. They agreed to offer, as Russian liberals, uncompromising resistance to what they cnsidered being the authoritarian government of Vladimir Putin and his associates.

n January 2004, Vladimir Bukovsky co-founded the Committee 2008, together with Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Kara-Murzaand others. This was an umbrella organisation of the democratic opposition that was set up to guarantee free and fair elections in 2008. The Committee 2008 proposed Bukovsky as a candidate for those elections. However, on December 22, 2007, Vladimir Bukovsky's candidacy was rejected by the Central Electoral Commission.

Bukovsky was involved in almost every action against undemocratic activities in the Russian Federation, such as the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the «secret war» that Russia had started that same year in the Ukrainian Donbas region and the poisoning of Aleksander Litvinenko in 2006. However, the government did not dare to deal with him like with the other dissidents. The sanctions against him were limited to rejecting his candidacy for the elections and to refusing passports and visas. He passed away on October 27, 2019 at the age of 76 of a heart attack in Cambridge.

Vladimir Kara-Murza

Vladimir Vladimirovichj Kara-Murza (°1981) is an opposition politician, journalist, authorr and filmmaker. A protégé of Boris Nemtsov, he became vice-chairman of Open Russia, an NGO founded by Russian businessman and former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovski, aiming to promote civil society and democracy in Russia. In 2012, he was elected to the Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition, an alliance of dissidents of all kinds. Members of this Council included Aleksey Navalny, the former chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and the former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov.

Kara-Murza became a journalist at the age of 16. He worked as a London correspondent for the newspapers Novye Izvestia and Kommersant, and for the radio station Echo Moskvy. Between 2000 and 2003 he was an adviser to opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in the State Duma. In January 2004, he co-founded the Committee 2008, an umbrella opposition group led by Boris Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov. In May 2007, Kara-Murza helped veteran human rights activist and writer Vladimir Bukovsky as a democratic opposition candidate for the Russian presidency in the 2008 elections. In 2012, he took part in the Moscow street protests against the Putin regime, the largest pro-democracy demonstrations in Russia since 1991. As a journalist who spoke fluent English and lived part-time in the United States, Kara-Murza played a role in the events leading up to the passage of the Magnitsky Act in 2012 by the United States Congress.

Vladimir Kara-Murza

At the end of 2014 he wrote about the many anti-democratic trends in Russia like, for example, Vladimir Putin's decision to had resume the Soviet practice of stripping dissidents of their Russian citizenship.

Two assassination attempts have been made on Kara-Murza, but he survived both. On May 26, 2015, he suddenly fell ill in Moscow during a meeting. The doctors had determined that he had been poisoned, but the diagnosis was later revised to kidney failure. On February 2, 2017, he was again hospitalised with the same symptoms as in 2015. This time, the doctors maintained their decision that it was the toxic influence of an unknown substance, but no further action was taken. Curiously, a blood sample was also sent to a United States FBI lab, but the FBI never released its findings.

On April 11, 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kara-Murza was arrested on charges of disobeying police orders. The arrest came hours after he had called Putin's government «a regime of murderers». On April 22, 2022, he was charged by a Russian court for allegedly spreading false information about the Russian military. In July, «collaboration with an undesirable foreign NGO» was added to the charges, followed by «betrayal» in October.

In April 2023, Russian prosecutors demanded a 25-year prison sentence. In addition, the prosecution also requested that the sentence be served in a prison colony with a strict regime. On April 17, 2023, this sentence was confirmed.

In July 2023, the four largest jurisdictions having Magnitsky-style sanctions programs (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and the European Union) imposed targeted sanctions on six Russian nationals who played a role in the detention and sentencing of Vladimir Kara- Murza. The concerned citizens are:

Vitali Aleksandrovich Belitsky and Yekaterina Mikhailovna Doroshina, the judges of the Moscow court who sentenced Kara-Murza;

Natalia Nikolaevna Dudar, the Judge of the Basmanny District Court who extended Kara-Murza's pre-trial detention;

Boris Georgievich Loktionov, the chief prosecutor who described Kara-Moerza as «an enemy of the state» and who insisted on the maximum sentence;

Danila Yurievich Mikheev, an expert witness for the Russian government who claimed that Kara-Murza's statements about the Russian armed forces amounted to spreading false information, which was part of the basis on which judge Yelena Lenskaya ordered Kara-Murza to be detained;>

Anna Yevgenievna Potychko, the prosecutor who supported the rejection of Kara-Murza's appeal against his pre-trial detention.

Come back, Mikhail Bulgakov

The Navalny and Magnitsky cases caused reactions, not only in Russia but also worldwide. On July 20, 2013, Denis MacShane, the former Minister of European Affairs of the United Kingdom, wrote: «Where are you Mikhail Bulgakov when we need you?»

Kirill Serebrennikov

On August 22, 2017, Kirill Semyonovich Serebrennikov (°1969), one of the most famous Russian film and theater directors, was arrested.

The arrest of Kirill Serebrennikov

Serebrennikov was the managing director of the Gogol Center, a progressive experimental theatre which is popular among liberals in Moscow. It is known for contemporary productions that are often directly related to political or sexual themes rarely displayed on stage in Moscow.

However, the indictment was not about Serebrennikov's political or moral views, but - you could already guess - about embezzlement. More specifically, it would be about an amount of 68 million rubles, about 975,000 euros or 1.15 million dollars. Serebrennikov is said to have, among others, misappropriated the 2,3 million rubles (32.999 euros or 39.359 dollar) of subsidies that he had received from 2011 to 2014 for the production of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream by his company Studio Seven. The Public Attorney said the piece has even never been staged. An absurd statement because, in reality, the play has been represented quite a few times, not only in Russia, but also in theatres abroad, among which the Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris and the Théâtre des Martyrs in Brussels. It got considerable attention in the press - both pro and contra -, and has even been nominated for theater prizes. When confronted with this finding, judge Tatyana Vasyuchenko of the Presnensky Court of Moscow replied laconically: «The publication of an article does not prove that the event really has taken place».

Serebrennikov had already had a difficult year 2017. In May, he was heard «as a witness in a fraud case», after the arrest of producer Aleksey Malobrodsky and bookkeeper Nina Maslyaeva, both former staff of Studio Seven. Maslyaeva would have provided «proof of the involvement of Serebrennikov» during the interrogations.

Afterwards, the representations of a ballet about the famous dancer Rudolf Nureev (1938-1993), which were scheduled for the month of July at the Bolshoy Theatre, were canceled three days before the planned premiere. According to director Vladimir Urin, the production was «not ready yet», but insiders reported that he was put under pressure to delete the ballet because the homosexual relations of Nureev were openly shown in it.

The judge of the Basmanny District Court - the same court that extended Kara-Murza's pre-trial detention - decided to put Serebrennikov under house arrest until October 19, 2017. More than 3,500 artists signed a letter of support asking the Ministry of Culture to withdraw the charges against the director. In vain, because in June 2020 Serebrennikov was convicted and given a three-year probationary period and a three-year ban from running a cultural institution with government support. He also had to pay a fine of 800,000 rubles.

On November 12, 2021, Serebrennikov reimbursed 129 million rubles claimed by the Ministry of Culture as compensation. In February 2021, Serebrennikov was fired from the Gogol Center.

On March 28, 2022, the court canceled the suspended sentence, taking into account that all financial damages had been repaid and that Serebrennikov received a positive profile during his tenure. The travel ban was lifted and Kirill was able to leave Russia

Some are allowed to embezzle money

On March 29, 2001 at 22:00, the police arrested a man and a woman who had tried to cross the border with Switzerland at the customs post of Bietingen near Gottmadingen, Germany. They carried a handbag and a briefcase with documents and computer disks. The woman was Tamara Rudich (°1959), a molecular biologist. The man was Oleg Lototsky (°1962), a friend and business associate of Miss Rudich. They said they were on a business trip to Zurich. The customs post of Bietingen is not on the normal routes to Switzerland, there are rarely individuals coming along.

The documents they were carrying showed transactions worth 5 billion USD on account of six banks, including Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, ABN AMRO Bank and the Bank of Cyprus. The report submitted by customs to the Central Office against financial crime in Baden-Württemberg, stated that the authorised signatory was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, President of the Russian Federation.

As far as we know, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was not questioned about this incident and is still a free man.

Not only trials

Quite some opponents of the regime of Vladimir Putin were not brought to court, but immediately killed. Especially journalists who wrote articles critical of the regime, were often brutally murdered. Not less than 144 journalist were killed between 1999, the year in which Putin started his first presidency, and 2014. One of them was Anna Politkovskaya, about whom you can read more by clicking the arrow below.

Anna Politkovskaya

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (1958-2006) was one of the few independant journalists in Russia and wrote for the Novaya Gazeta, the only newspaper daring to be critical, and she published some books of which Dirty War is well known. She was often threatened. A Russian army officer was impeached for it in 2003, but he was discharged. On October 7, 2006 she was found dead in an elevator of her apartment in Moscow, she appeared to be shot. The murderer had left the weapon, a revolver with bullits, in the elevator.

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya

In February 2009, three suspects of the murder were brought to justice: Sergey Khadzhikurbanov, a former officer of the Moscow Police Directorate against Organized Crime, and two Chechen brothers Ibrahim Makhmudov and Dzhabrail Makhmudov. A third brother, Rustam Makhmudov, who would have fired the gun, could not be arrested because he was hiding in Belgium. The three accused were acquitted by a jury. After public protests, mainly from western countries, the Russian Supreme Court ordered a new trial. In the spring of 2011, a delegation of Russian investigators was sent to Belgium, where Rustam Makhmudov and his uncle Lom-Ali Gaitukaev were interrogated in the prisons of Dendermonde and Liège and handed over to the Russian authorities.

On December 14, 2012, Dmitry Pavlyuchenko, another former police officer, was sentenced to 11 years of penal colony for his involvement in the murder of Politkovskaya. At the time of the murder, Pavlyuchenko was lieutenant-colonel of the Fourth Division of the Moscow Police Search Unit. He told the investigators that the murder had been organised by Lom-Ali Gaitukaev, on demand of businessman Boris Abramovich Berezovsky (1946-2013). It would specifically have been asked to commit the murder on 7 October, the birthday of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (°1952). Gaitukaev would have been commissioned in July 2006, and would then have asked Pavlyuchenko, Khadzhikurbanov and his three cousins ​​to carry it out. But Aleksandr Bastrykin, head of the Investigation Commission, declared that there is no evidence for the involvement of Berezovsky.

Berezovsky, businessman and friend of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007), was convicted in Russia in absentia for embezzlement, fraud and money laundering, and lived in self-imposed exile in the United Kingdom since 2001. He got a refugee status in London and a passport in which he changed his name to Platon Elenin. He remained a staunch critic of Vladimir Putin, and was found dead in his apartment on March 23, 2013, with a noose around the neck.

On May 20, 2014 the three brothers Makhmudov, their uncle Lom-Ali Gaitukaev and Sergey Khadzhikurbanov were eventually found guilty by a jury in Moscow. On June 9, 2014, Lom-Ali Gaitukaev and Rustam Makhmudov were sentenced to life. Sergey Khadzhikurbanov was given 20 years, while the two other Makhmudov brothers were sentenced to 12 and 14 years as accomplices. The five exchanged smiles in their glass-fronted courtroom cage before they all received long sentences.

Vladimir Markin, the spokesman of the Investigative Committee said that the authorities are still looking for the real mastermind behind the murder. «Exhaustive measures are being taken at this time to find the killing’s initiator», he said.

Boris Nemtsov

Another opponent of the regime who’s life was violently ended was Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov (1959-2015).

Nemtsov entered politics during the failed coup against former Soviet leader Mikhail Sergeevich  Gorbachev (°1931) in August 1991. He organised the protest of citizens against insurgent soldiers in the defense of the parliament building. The coup failed and Nemtsov was noticed and included in the staff of former Russian President Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin (1931-2007). As a governor of his home city of Nizhny Novgorod, and from 1997 as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy, he played a major role in the privatisation of former communist state enterprises

In 1998, he had to resign and he founded the liberal party Union of Right Forces. He was a leader of the liberal opposition to President Vladimir Putin. In 2004, he supported the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and he was economic adviser to the former Ukrainian President Viktor Andriyovych  Yushchenko (°1953), whose face got severely disfigured as a result of a dioxin poisoning during the election campaign.

Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov

Boris Nemtsov was shot in central Moscow on Friday, February 27, 2015. He was 55 years old. An unidentified gunman shot him four times in the back when he was walking across the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Most, a bridge at less than 100 meters from the Kremlin. He died a few hours after he had made a call to protest against the war in Ukraine in a mass demonstration on the next Sunday. A few days before the murder he had said in an interview that he feared that the president wanted him dead for his opposition to the war. The place where the murder was committed, and where your webmaster passed daily when he was living in Moscow, is infested with CCTV cameras. Therefore, there must be images of what happened. It was striking that the Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Alexandrovich Kolokoltsev (°1961), arrived immediately after the events at the crime scene to «supervise the investigation personally».

In 2013, Mentsov published Winter Olympics in the Sub-Tropics, a report on the corruption and abuse involved in the organisation of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The former President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, (°1967) told CNN that Nemtsov was now working on a report about the Russian involvement in the conflict with Ukraine. «He prepared an announcement on Ukraine,» Saakashvili said. «He wanted to tell the Russian public what is going on there.» This may have been fatal to Nemtsov. Journalist and Human Rights activist Aleksandr Ryklin, a friend of his said: «Anyone who stands up for Ukraine these days s seen as a traitor by the Russian media. An atmosphere is created in which everyone who disagrees with Putin is a traitor. This is certainly true when it comes to Ukraine. »

Russia officially denies that its soldiers are fighting in Ukraine. In reality, Russian soldiers are killed every day in this «undeclared war». Their bodies are returned to Russia in trucks as Груз 200 [Gruz 200] or Cargo 200, the code name used in Russia for dead bodies as they are transported from the battlefield. Nemtsov was shot down in Moscow shortly after he had announced that he would publish a detailed report about the Russian involvement in Ukraine under the title Путин. Война. [Putin. Voyna] or Putin. War. After Nemtsov's death, some of his colleagues completed his report and published it on the Internet.

You can download Boris Mentsov's report from this website using the following link [ru].

According to British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, Russia has «solved» the problem of the Cargo 200 in its own way. The country now has mobile crematoriums that can follow invading forces and «evaporate» dead soldiers. The British Ministry of Defense released a video of the trucks that can incinerate bodies one at a time and suggested on February 23, 2022, that the Kremlin might deploy them in its war with Ukraine in to hide the number of casualties.

Zaur Dadaev

On June 29, 2017, the Chechen ex-serviceman Zaur Dadaev was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the murder of Nemtsov. He was arrested along with four companions who got sentences between 11 and 19 years in prison. Nemtsov's family is convinced that the five are not the real perpetrators, but only pawns of the real mastermind behind the attack: the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov (°1976). Kadyrov called Dadaev «one of the bravest fighters he has ever known.

Ramzan Kadyrov