07 Sep 23 | News and features, Russia
Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian-British activist, journalist, author and filmmaker who was imprisoned in Russia for 25 years in April. He was found guilty of treason, spreading “false information” about the Russian armed forces and participating in an “undesirable organisation”. On 31 July his sentence appeal was quashed. The court that sentenced him, his lawyer claims, are “slaves to (Vladimir) Putin’s regime”.
Today is Kara-Murza’s 42nd birthday and he will be spending it behind bars, though activist and financier Bill Browder, a noted Putin critic, thinks Russia has made a mistake in jailing him: “Putin has elevated his status exponentially,” he told Index.
“When things get rocky due to the disastrous war, Russians will decide who should replace Putin. Somebody, like Vladimir, who gave up their freedom and potentially life for the good of the country, will be highly validated.”
The son of a Russian journalist also called Vladimir, Kara-Murza earned an MA in history from Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge at the same time as working as a reporter for a number of Russian newspapers. After becoming Washington Bureau Chief of the Russian language network RTVi in 2004, he produced a four-part TV documentary, They Chose Freedom, about one of his passions: the history of the Soviet dissident movement.
After being released from RTVi in 2012, he helped advance the 2012 US Magnitsky Act, a law that imposed sanctions on Russian officials thought to be responsible for serious human rights violations, denying them entry into the USA and freezing any US assets. Browder noted the impact Kara-Murza had in its adoption.
“He pitched to the US government and Congress that it was the most pro-Russian piece of legislation because it punished kleptocrats and human rights deniers in the Russian government.
“His was one of the key voices for politicians to support it,” he said.
This wasn’t without negative consequences. In 2015 Kara-Murza was hospitalised with kidney failure and was in a coma for a week. Tests revealed he had ingested a poisonous substance. He was back in hospital again in 2017 with the same diagnosis. He survived both and went on to collect the Civil Courage Prize and was a pallbearer at former US Senator John McCain’s funeral in 2018. Despite his survival, the incidents have had long-term impacts on his health. Kara-Murza’s lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, said it’s led to heart disease and a nerve condition called polyneuropathy.
“This condition is hard to treat in freedom, impossible in prison. A doctor from the Moscow medical prison system claimed he could survive just a couple more years. It’s a matter of life and death,” Prokhorov told Index.
After being initially arrested last year in Moscow for disobeying a police officer, Kara-Murza soon faced more more serious charges, resulting in the long sentence.
“His sentence is based on just five public speeches, including [one in which] he criticised Putin’s full-scale invasion in front of the US Congress in March 2022,” Prokhorov said.
“The sentence is completely unjustified. It’s his opinion, his free speech. It’s straight out of the Stalin playbook. It’s dangerous for Russian civil society”.
Prokhorov believes Kara-Murza has been, or is currently being, transferred to the Omsk Betrayal Detention Centre No.1 in Siberia after he lost his appeal, but doesn’t think it’s his final place of detention.
Explaining that Kara-Murza has defended human rights not just in Russia, but also with the promotion of Magnitsky Acts all over the world, Prokhorov ends by saying: “Vladimir’s a brilliant, intelligent, thoughtful and brave man. It’s important the civil and international community don’t forget about him.”
05 Jul 23 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
They shot the children’s poet in the head. Two bullets from a Makharov, the Russian army handgun, his grave identified, his voice stilled. Until, that is, Victoria Amelina turned up at the Izium home of the murdered poet, Volodymyr Vakulenko. Gentle, calm, dogged, Victoria had stopped work as a novelist to become a war crimes investigator, her mission to listen to Ukraine’s bereaved: “That it is not like ‘this happened’ and nobody asks them about it.”
She found Vakulenko’s father, crushed by grief, and over the course of a long conversation, his memory unlocked and he said that his son had told him that he had buried his diary near the cherry tree in the family’s garden. They dug and dug.
Nothing.
And then Victoria, on impulse, opened up the earth a little distance from the tree and they found the dead poet’s diary, wrapped in water-proof plastic, breaking the silence. The diary told of Russian occupation, of a tank squatting outside in the street, the creeping sense of dread, his arrest, release – and then they came for him one last time. But not before he had buried his words by the cherry tree.
Victoria understood that the best stories are the ones that power and money do not want told. That was last year.
In late June Victoria was sitting outside on the terrace at the Ria pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, about thirty miles from Bakhmut. The Ria is an institution, a sweet hiding hole where journalists, aid workers, soldiers and local families unwind from the horrors of the frontline. Driven by my fixer in Ukraine, Dima Kovalchuk, Victoria was escorting Colombian journalists, Héctor Abad, Sergio Jaramillo and Catalina Gómez around the war zone. Victoria was doing her best to shine a light on the Kremlin’s dark nonsense. Too many people in the global south have bought into the Russian lie but not these South Americans.
Dima told me: “the awning above is see-through and I saw a shadow overhead, it was the missile, then this intense explosion.”
Jaramillo explained to the Financial Times: “I was sitting right next to Victoria. We had just finished a day in the field, talking to people about the Russian invasion. As the food was brought to us, I bent down to pick up a napkin and, at that moment, the missile struck. Victoria, who had been sitting upright, was badly hit at the back of the neck… the whole room fell to pieces and time stopped.”
Dima said that Victoria never recovered from her head injury. The rest of the team were lightly injured. Thirteen people died, including two fourteen-year-old twins; fifty people were injured. Firing a cruise missile at a pizza restaurant packed with civilians was yet another Russian war crime.
Victoria was born in Lviv, moved to Canada when she was a teenager, worked in IT, got bored with that and became a full-time writer. Her first novel, Fall Syndrome, was about the Maidan revolution, her second, Dom’s Dream Kingdom, established her international reputation. She won the Joseph Conrad Literary Award and was short-listed for the European Union Prize for Literature. Before the big war she set up a literary festival in New York, a village not far from Bakhmut, and a second in Kramatorsk. Her poetry was spare and bleak:
Sirens
Air-raid sirens across the country
It feels like everyone is brought out
For execution
But only one person gets targeted
Usually the one at the edge
This time not you; all clear
I met Victoria once, at a café in Kyiv, this spring. She recognised my silly orange hat and we talked about working together, one day, on a war crimes investigation but our schedules didn’t work out and that never happened. There was a still beauty about her spirit that is haunting, an echo from a friend, calling out the big lie.
I cannot believe they have silenced her.
I cannot believe that she is dead.
30 Jun 23 | News and features, Newsletters, Russia, Ukraine
Last week’s mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, provided a challenge to established western media outlets, such was the speed of the advance by the man known as Putin’s chef towards Moscow and the lack of verifiable information coming out of Russia. The subsequent accommodation between Prigozhin and Putin, apparently brokered by the Belarus leader Alyaksandr Lukashenska, has left even the most seasoned neo-Kremlinologists scratching their heads.
Step forward the Russian dissidents and independent news services. Index has been privileged to work with the opposition to Putin since long before the war in Ukraine and it was good to see them coming into their own last week. Here are some of our recommendations for those who want to stay abreast of the fast-moving and often baffling developments in Russia. Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock), the managing editor of the English-language version of the independent online site Meduza, kept his Twitter feed consistently updated during the coup-that-never-was. Where others were breathless and over-excited, Rothrock was calm and measured. His colleague Lilya Yapparova (@lilia_yapparova) provided detailed analysis on the future of Prigozhin from sources inside the Russian military and the Wagner Group itself. Yapparova’s far-reaching investigation looks into what Wagner forces might contribute to Belarusian military capacity and the organisation’s operations in Africa and Syria. She also looks into Wagner’s finances in Russia, its continued recruitment for the war in Ukraine and internet trolling operations. Yapporova quotes the work of Dossier Center, a media outlet connected to the British-based Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsksy, which tracks criminals associated with the Russian president. Khodorkovsky himself was active on his Telegram channel throughout the mutiny and accessible to non-Russian speakers through the messaging app’s translate function. Controversially he urged Russians to support Prigozhin’s coup. His view was that anything would be better than Putin. The Russian billionaire later concluded that the outcome of Prigozhin’s operation was not important. “The very fact that this happened is a powerful blow to Putin after which he will be perceived differently by millions.”
Doxa, the publication founded by students opposed by Putin and now outlawed by the regime, continues to do a good job of aggregating news from reliable sources. This week it included a report from The Bell, founded by Russian financial journalist Elizaveta Osetinskaya, suggesting that Prigozhin’s troll factory companies have been paralysed following raids after the uprising and were looking for a new owner. Osetinskaya, a former editor of Russian Forbes magazine, was declared a foreign agent after condemning the invasion of Ukraine.
In a new development this week, Novaya Gazeta, the independent Russian news outlet whose editor Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, was put on the Kremlin’s list of “undesirable” organisations. This makes it a crime for the publication, now based in Latvia, to operate in Russia. It is also now illegal for Russians to engage with the publication or share its content online.
OVD-Info, the human rights project which won the 2022 Index on Censorship campaigning award, decided not to provide a running commentary of events and stuck to its mission of reporting on arrests of regime opponents. In his weekly newsletter Dan Storyev, English editor of OVD-Info, wrote: “Russia has had a busy few days as I am sure we all know. This newsletter is not for military analysis so I won’t cover Prigozhin’s manoeuvres here — but it’s important to remember, that in the end, it is going to be ordinary Russians, Russian civil society who would bear the brunt of any violence that a coup, or a paranoid preventive crackdown could unleash.”
If there is one thing that unites all the outlets mentioned here (beyond their undoubted courage), it is the care they take in the sourcing of all information they publish. In the post-truth world of Putin’s Russia, facts are precious commodities.
30 Jun 23 | Belarus, News and features, Russia, United Kingdom
Yesterday I met with a close friend who happens to be a journalist. In the way that friends do, we were talking about our families, work and what we were going to do over the summer.
We both have lives that are ludicrously busy but as she was talking about the stories she has had to cover over the last two weeks I was struck by not just the importance of her journalism but the demands we place on individual journalists as the vital storytellers of the news we consume every day.
Our world can be a scary and complex place. Every week it feels as though we have had an excess of news stories and little time to absorb one story before the world throws something else at us. And that just refers to the news we manage to hear and read. We are completely dependent on incredible journalists who ensure that the most challenging of stores are comprehensible for the rest of us. Highlighting the key issues that we need to be worried about.
It’s easy for all of us to listen to the news and then move on with our days. After all, we each have our own dramas, our own worries and our own concerns. But we get on with our lives reassured that someone is always shining a spotlight on the things that we need to know about. That teams of dedicated investigative journalists are working day in and day out to hold power accountable. Demanding answers from those who have power and exposing where we as citizens have been let down.
So this blog is a celebration of investigative journalists. Brave, dedicated, professional, honest and incredibly determined people. Who in the last week have ensured that Stephen Lawrence’s family know the name of another suspect – thank you Daniel de Simone.
Journalists who have proved that the Wagner Group is still recruiting in Russia and Belarus – thank you Sarah Rainsford and BBC Verify.
Journalists who proved beyond doubt that Christmas parties happened at the Conservative Party HQ during the Covid lockdown – thank you John Stevens and Mikey Smith.
Each of these stories represent dozens more covered this week in every country that is lucky enough to have a free media.
We shouldn’t just seek to protect our hard-won rights to media freedom, every so often we need to celebrate the journalists who strive to uncover the truth every day and that’s what I’m doing today.
