Grigory Yavlinsky: “You know that this is illegal, but you want to curry favour with Putin”
Grigory Yavlinsky’s Facebook post, 09.08.2018
Photo: Anna Pavlikova and Maria Dubovik
- It is already five months, that 18-year-old Anna Pavlikova, 19-year-old Maria Dubovik, 21-year-old Vyacheslav Kryukov, 25-year-old Sergey Gavrilov, 25-year-old Ruslan Kostylenkov, 30-year-old Dmitry Poletayev and 31-year-old Pyotr Karamzin are in Moscow pre-trial detention prisons. Another four people under investigation on the case of creating an “extremist organisation” are under home arrest.
- The reason for the arrests was an illegal and criminal provocation by the Federal Security Service /the Interior Ministry. The agents of the Federal Security Service /the Interior Ministry invented, persuaded and forced young people to create an anti-government organisation. The agents wrote the statute, and provoked extremist topics for discussion. It is absolutely clear that the criminal case against these people was conceived, prepared and fabricated in the Federal Security Service /the Interior Ministry. This fact is confirmed even by the materials of the investigation. I repeat: the deliberate instigation of citizens by law enforcement agencies for extremist activities pursued by law is unlawful and criminal. A separate unlawful act is the involvement in a pre-planned provocation of persons under 18 years of age – like Anna Pavlikova.
- The [young people] arrested on a case which was obviously fabricated by the secret services and being unlawfully imprisoned in the remand prisons are losing their health, experience psychological and physical pressure. According to media reports, the girls who have hardly crossed the threshold of adulthood are diagnosed with serious diseases that progress every day in the conditions of the remand prison.
- Mr. Bortnikov {Director of the Federal Security Service], Mr. Bastrykin [Chair of the Russian Investigation Committee] and Mr. Kolokoltsov [head of the interior], you bear a personal responsibility for the deliberate, pre-planned unlawful anti-constitutional action – the organisation of a provocation so that to involve citizens in the so-called “extremist activities”. You know perfectly well that it is illegal, but you do it to curry favour with Putin.
- I demand that you curb your administrative-criminal zeal and that of your subordinates! Your unleashed watchdogs sensing the smell of hatred and permissiveness in the country, are ready to bite people whose guilt is only that they succumbed to your filthy provocations only because of their youth.
- The methods you apply are well-known methods of the state terror and punitive forces from the secret services of the 1930s. This is your “new old greatness” in a stagnant economy, rapidly growing poverty and destruction, robbing of old people, war and international isolation.
- The flywheel of state terror is gaining momentum in our eyes. The state of Putin sends a signal to people through their punitive bodies: don’t you like the authoirties? They will come for you soon! Fear is the last stronghold of the “new greatness” of the old regime.
- Having signed the petition together with thousands of [Russian] citizens [demanding release of young people] I also call on my fellow citizens to join the demand for a change in the pre-trial restriction for Anna Pavlikova and Maria Dubovik and the release of young girls from the remand prison. This petition-demand gives at least a small chance that we will be heard, and the girls and other victims of the provocation by secret services will save their lives and health.
- The country’s leadership must give a legal and political assessment of what is happening and give direct instructions to independent public prosecutors to conduct an objective investigation of this case, punish the organisers and perpetrators of criminal provocations, which are a precedent for Russia’s relapse into new state terror.
- I am fully aware that our demands will be cynically neglected. Then it should be understood that what happens to the 18-year-old Anna Pavlikova, the 19-year-old Maria Dubovik and many more (hundreds or thousands?) young people, casual ordinary laymen is a powerful and intelligible signal for the mass emigration of young people from Russia, the way to the final and irreparable backwardness and degradation [of the country].
P.S. Meanwhile Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker, who protested against the annexation of Crimea and was sentenced by a Russian court for 20 years of imprisonment for the “sabotage” on the territory of Crimea (the victims of which the investigation did not find), is dying in the penal colony.
Posted: August 9th, 2018 under Human Rights.