[ad_1]
Alena Kitaeva, a volunteer for Navalny’s key ally Lyubov Sobol, finds herself in a room with four police officers in Moscow, one of whom puts a plastic bag over her head and threatens to strangle her unless she tells him the password. from your phone.
Did you know that we can hit you so hard that you will urinate blood later? And there will be no clues, you won’t be able to prove anything, “the police shouted in Peter Sokov’s face, after he found himself in a small room with six security guards at a St. Petersburg police station.
Just hours before this horrific scene, in Russia’s second-largest city, Sokov was arrested for taking part in a rally in support of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Sokovik says his arrest was sudden and brutal – he checked his phone when someone he thought was a plainclothes police officer pushed him onto the road. The man was then grabbed by the hair and coat by the police in protective gear and dragged into a police van.
Then for Sokov comes “an eternity” of interrogations. He claims that the police tried to force him to admit that a foreign agent had paid him to attend the rally. Russia has repeatedly accused the United States of fueling the protests.
“We will lock you up for 5 years. We will put you in a cell where the prisoners will rape you again and again. Is that what you want? No? Then tell us!” The policeman yelled.
Alena Kitaeva, a volunteer for Navalny’s key ally Lyubov Sobol, finds herself in a room with four police officers in Moscow, one of whom puts a plastic bag over her head and threatens to strangle her unless she tells him the password. from her phone, her colleague Olga Klyuchinikova told CNN. Following interrogation, Alena was sentenced to 12 days in prison.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to a question about Kitaeva’s case at a daily press conference. According to him, if what she described actually happened, then she should have filed a lawsuit. Kitaeva is currently in prison.
Sokov and several other protesters, who spoke to CNN, claimed to have been harassed by security forces. Attacks against them included violence, threats, intimidation, and overcrowding in vans or cells.
In recent weeks, Russian authorities have detained about 11,000 people at demonstrations in support of Navalny, according to OVD-Info, an independent website that monitors the arrests. Some were released a few hours later. But in Moscow and St. Petersburg, detention centers quickly exhausted their capacity, forcing detainees to wait on buses for hours without basic necessities.
Sokov was eventually released, but he worries that charges will be brought against him later.
Ivan Klementiev was hired as a news photographer covering the demonstrations in Moscow on January 31, when police arrested him with electric shocks and batting, splitting his temple, his wife told CNN. He was then put into a police van and had to wait hours for medical treatment.
Businessman Filip Kuznetsov was forced to go to the demonstrations when Navalny’s team first called a protest. He was arrested on January 23 in Moscow. Kuznetsov says he then spent more than 19 hours without sleep in a crowded police van waiting for a vacancy in custody.
“It was cold and the truck was so full that someone had to stop at any moment, so we took turns to see who was sitting,” he told CNN. None of his supporters slept the entire time, and a human rights group supplied food and water, he said.
Both Kuznetsov and Klementiev appeared in court after two days in custody. The judges sentenced them to 10 days in prison each for participating in unauthorized demonstrations. Both ended up in the Sakharov facility on the outskirts of Moscow, commonly used as a detention center for foreign nationals.
“You look at these white concrete walls in Sakharov and then you’re really scared,” Kuznetsov said. “You think, ‘This is it. The regime has shown its teeth. You understand that they sent us to a place like this, after which we will definitely not go to the rally again. This is total hell.”
Images from the Sakharov Detention Center show grim conditions inside: metal-frame beds without mattresses, an open toilet. There was also no social distancing or wearing of masks, even though members of Navalny’s team were placed under house arrest for allegedly violating sanitary rules during the coronavirus pandemic due to calls for protests.
Russian journalists pressured Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in a conference call with reporters to comment on what one journalist called “probably the greatest crackdown modern Russia has seen,” citing mass arrests and mistreatment of journalists covering the protests.
“I do not agree with you. There is no repression in Russia,” Peskov said. “The police only take action against violators of the law, against participants in unauthorized demonstrations.” He acknowledged that there were more detainees than could be prosecuted, but that “the tough police efforts were justified in accordance with the law.”
Conditions in Sakharov sparked public outrage after Sergei Smirnov, editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Mediazona, which covered Russia’s judicial system and human rights abuses, shared photos showing him huddled in a cell with 27 other people. . He was sentenced to 25 days in prison in Sakharov.
Smirnov’s crime is a shared joke, which the court considered “incitement to participate in an unauthorized rally”. He claims innocence and did not even attend the demonstration.
In a video message to CNN provided by his cellmate Dmitry Shelomentsev, Smirnov described the conditions in which he and his cellmates found themselves. After photos and videos were posted on social media illustrating the poor conditions, Smirnov and Shelomentsev were transferred to a cell with fewer people.
Outside Sakharovo, friends and relatives of detainees wait for hours in cold temperatures, hoping to deliver food and water to their loved ones. Volunteers have set up telegram chats to connect people with detained family members and coordinate efforts to provide them with essentials.
Alexander Golovach, a lawyer for the Navalny Foundation for the Fight Against Corruption, who spent three days in a small cell in a police station before arriving in Sakharov, said that the help was essential: “The first day we were there, we did not they gave food, because there was simply no food, and what we ate the next day assured us that we could not count on the authorities. It was a mockery: huge bowls containing the thinnest layer of oatmeal. “
Sokov says police threats and violence are the reason so many people take to the streets in protest.
“People are protesting for basic human rights, the right to a fair trial. Navalny came to embody the lack of those rights and the fact that everything is happening in violation of all the rules and regulations. This is already happening so openly that he’s just spitting in our faces. People can’t accept that. ”
[ad_2]
