Press Release, 31.03.2023

Mikhail Afanasyev, a member of Yabloko and a journalist, has been in jail for a year already on the charges of spreading fake news about the army “using his official position”. On 29 March, new court hearings on the case of Mikhail Afanasyev began in Abakan, Khakassia. The investigators consider Afanasyev’s article 11 fighters of the Khakassian riot police refused to go to the special operation zone a year ago as spreading fake news.

Yabloko activists sent letters of support to Mikhail. Afanasyev sent a reply letter to party members. In this letter he metaphorically analyses what is happening and tells about his case.

“You and I have to live in a terrible time. Certainly, there have been more tragic and more terrible [times], but we have always believed that all important and necessary conclusions have already been made in our time, and we are definitely, albeit with difficulties, moving along progressive way. But suddenly there returned fear, the prohibition to speak and discuss certain topics, distrust and suspicion.

The mind refuses to believe that all this is really happening. That journalists, public figures and simply caring citizens are in prisons for their words. As if common sense entered the final battle with abnormality.”

Afanasyev compares the country with a sick person who prefers to hide his sickness, rather than to cure it. Such a person “suppresses in every possible way the attempts of other people to help him, pointing to an abscess and publicly declaring that it must be treated so that it does not harm the whole organism. He accuses such people of deliberate slander, the desire to undermine his authority and discredit him”.

“This is exactly what is happening to me. They have been holding me for a year now in prison, they have taken away my housing, they mocked my family, and they defame me in the controlled press just because I dared to point out an ulcer in society. But in fact, I fulfilled my professional duty, as a physician, rescuer or any statesman does. How much effort and money is sent to defeat normality with abnormality, to impose one’s own reality on other people. And, most importantly, for what? How much effort does it take to beat a journalist and make him look like a liar?” Afanasyev writes.

“Sometimes it seems to me that the System adapted to abnormality long ago and strongly resists any calls for normality… At the same time, the System still shows miracles of suppressing what is alien to it. In my case, I am invited to prove the reality of the words of my respondents in the article… The material is research about the event, and people talked about it, using their inalienable right to express their opinion about the event, the participants and eyewitnesses of which they became. How can I legally prove that someone else’s opinion is true? And how could the person expressing this opinion prove it? Since when did it become necessary to prove the opinions, assessments and judgments of people legally and they became punishable?” the letter runs.

In conclusion of his letter Mikhail Afanasyev asks Yabloko members not to leave his family and also write to him more often, “as after all, we are members of the best party in Russia”.

Yabloko asks all caring citizens to go on writing letters of support to Mikhail and continues the fundraising campaign to help Mikhial Afanasyev’s family.