24 Feb 23 | Ruth's blog
One year ago we all watched in horror as Putin’s Russia initiated an all out invasion of Ukraine. The people of Ukraine did nothing to initiate this war, they did not choose violence, but every family is now paying the price for this Putin’s aggression. Ukrainian families are divided, spread throughout Europe. People are traumatised, they have lost loved ones and too many live under perpetual fear of the next Russian onslaught.
The UN believes that over 8,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the last year, with thousands more hurt as the Russians bombard urban areas. And as they defend themselves against Russian aggression every person able to fight has joined the military – everyone is on the frontline.
I make no apologies for standing with the people of Ukraine, for supporting Nato’s efforts to support the Ukrainian military as they seek to defend their people and their homes. As US president Joe Biden made clear this week this war is now the frontline in the battle of autocrats versus democrats. And I, like you, am a democrat.
Twelve months on there are so many stories, of death, of heartbreak but also of inspirational acts from people who never expected to be on the frontline. As ever it is their stories which we should tell, it’s their pain we should mark and their losses which we share. It is their stories which should feature this week and every week – until Ukraine is free.
In the midst of war, however, it is easy to forget the dissidents, the people who are adamant that Putin doesn’t act in their name, the people whose actions will hopefully one day lead to peace. In the heat of war, whilst living under an authoritarian regime, it requires a significant level of bravery to speak out – to challenge your government, to oppose military action. Today’s stats tally 19,586 people who have been arrested across the Russian Federation for protesting the war.
Index was founded to provide a platform for Soviet dissidents over 50 years ago at the height of the Cold War. Our raison d’etre is to provide a voice for the persecuted, a place where the brave and the disillusioned can tell their stories, to help dissidents who live in authoritarian regimes. The last year has taken my team and I full circle, reminding us of our roots and ensuring that we keep striving to promote and protect the right of freedom of expression in totalitarian regimes.
Today we remember those that have paid the ultimate sacrifice to defend their country, the civilians who have been caught in the crossfire and those brave dissidents who in the direst of circumstances keep trying to speak truth to power.
Slava Ukraini
24 Feb 23 | Belarus, FEATURED: Jessica Ní Mhainín, News and features, Ukraine
The people in Belarus are not willing to fight against Ukraine. It won’t be easy to convince them,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky told the Munich Security Conference last week amid threats from Belarus that it could join the Russian offensive. The Belarusian regime has supported Russia since the invasion, but their armed forces have not (yet) been directly involved in the conflict.
Like in Russia, anti-war rhetoric has been heavily repressed in Belarus. Last March mothers of Belarusian soldiers were arrested after they gathered in the church to pray for peace. And only last week a 65-year-old garage owner was fined, and his business closed for having called Russian military personnel “occupiers” and refusing to sell them goods.
Nonetheless, some political prisoners have managed to communicate their feelings about the war. “We are one, we used to be at peace […] Hide your pride and shake hands,” Siarhei Sakavets wrote in his poem “22.02.2022” on the eve of the invasion. “There are so many rumours about everything that is happening, and the news on TV. God help me. I am very worried about you,” Larysa Kuzmenka wrote to her daughter and grandson last November.
Reading these letters from Belarusian political prisoners published by Index on Censorship, Pasha Bystrova – a Ukrainian woman who now lives in the Netherlands – says she felt a sense of “extreme injustice”. In different ways, Ukrainians and Belarusians are being deprived of their fundamental rights. They are suffering the consequences of tyranny.
Bystrova, who now works with refugees – including Ukrainian refugees – told Index that she feels that political prisoners and refugees are alike in that they are often perceived as being ‘the other’ by wider society. They are misunderstood because many people have preconceived ideas of who a ‘political prisoner’ or ‘refugee’ is. Having read political prisoners’ letters, Bystrova said: “I felt this could be me, any of us or our loved ones.”
Bystrova feels that the fates of Ukraine and Belarus are intertwined. “I believe the result of this war will greatly influence the situation in Belarus,” Bystrova told Index. “The collapse of the Lukashenka regime is inevitable.” That’s why defending Ukraine is “for our freedom and yours”.
Index on Censorship has so far published letters from 29 of the 1450 political prisoners in Belarus. Read their letters here
21 Feb 23 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
Immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov loudly announced the active involvement of Chechen security forces in it. Units of the Russian army and the Interior Ministry for Chechnya, which de facto report to Kadyrov personally, lined the grounds of his residence in the centre of the Chechen capital. Kadyrov said at the time that 12,000 Chechen volunteers were ready to leave for any special operation in the interests of Russia.
Since then, various sources have claimed that about 200 Chechens have been killed. The figure for the number of Chechens fighting for Russia is about 10,000 according to Kadyrov. Russian human rights activists put the number at around 3,000.
In September 2022 several women decided to organise a demonstration against sending Chechens to join Russia’s war. In a voice message that circulated on social media at the time, the organisers called on people to come to the central square of the city of Grozny: “They killed us in two wars, aren’t there enough dead, mutilated and crippled?” the woman in the message asks. On the same day, Kadyrov said on his Telegram channel that the women had been detained, a preventive conversation was held with them, and he promised to send their sons to fight in Ukraine.
This was something of an understatement. The human rights group Memorial has since confirmed that the women were taken to Grozny’s City Hall and their husbands forced to beat them. The son of at least one of the women was sent to Ukraine and her husband died a few days later, seemingly of “a broken heart”.
This kind of harsh reaction had an effect: people became afraid to express their opinions, even in front of their long-time friends. Umar from Grozny says that recently a friend of his sent a meme about the war in Ukraine into a group chat room, and five minutes later deleted it. “This has never happened before, everyone knows everyone in this chat room and before the war everyone trusted each other,” said Umar.
That said, one activist of a Russian human rights organisation believes that the situation of free speech in Chechnya has changed, but not necessarily for the worse. She confirms that people are less likely to express their discontent with the authorities in public, but among trusted circles, criticism of the Chechen authorities has become harsher. She says that even those who used to be apolitical are now speaking out against the actions of the authorities. She believes that the people who fear that their sons who survived the Chechen wars or were born later will die in a new, “alien war”.
According to Marina, a 33-year-old who works at a public institution in Chechnya, “not a single lunch with friends goes by without talking about Ukraine”. She follows all the news from the front and cheers for Ukraine’s victory. Most of Marina’s friends also support Ukraine and want Russia to lose. When she and her friends discuss Ukraine in a café, everyone keeps asking each other to keep their voices down.
“Ukraine is going through the same thing we went through. The same rhetoric, only we were accused of being a nation of terrorists, while the Ukrainians are ‘Nazis’,” Marina said. She is sure that among Chechens there is no patriotism toward Russia. “Where does it come from?” she asked rhetorically.
“The Chechens we see on social networks and state channels talking about love for Russia are people who need something from the authorities. They pursue purely material goals.”
Marina personally knows Chechens who went to Ukraine for money but that was at the very beginning of the war (the minimum amount paid by the Russian government for participation in the war is 195,000 rubles monthly, about $2615),
Umar, 43, a courier from Grozny, tells of his neighbour who was sent to Ukraine recently. “He liked to drink and make noise. He was taken to prison and stayed there for several months. Then he was offered: either you go to Ukraine or we put you in jail for a long time. He agreed to Ukraine. I recently saw a picture of him standing somewhere in the Luhansk region of Ukraine, in a Russian military uniform, with a submachine gun in his hands”. According to Umar, there are many such cases.
There are also those in Chechnya who think differently and support Kadyrov’s army. These are mostly families of Chechens who are fighting on the side of Russia. “They are not rooting for Russia’s victory, but for their family members,” said Tamara, a 49-year-old housewife from a Chechen village. Those whose children have gone to fight in Ukraine sincerely want them to return home and support them. These parents need to explain to themselves that their sons are not risking their lives for nothing, and they speak “the language of television” Tamara said. Most of their rhetoric boils down to a line they’ve been told that Russia was forced to attack and that “the (Russian) government isn’t stupid”.
For the residents of Grozny, which was rebuilt after almost total destruction in the early 2000s, today they live ordinary, peaceful lives. As in other Russian cities, there is almost no indication that the country is waging an aggressive war against its neighbour. It is almost the same war Russia waged against Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000s when it fought for independence. The graffiti on the walls that used to say “Welcome to hell”, left for the Russian soldiers by Chechen fighters for independence, has been replaced by murals depicting Kadyrov and his men. But there is little faith in the sincerity of Kadyrov’s love for the Russian leadership. Marina says:
“Kadyrov has no patriotism for Russia. All he protects is his position and his stability.”
This article is written by a journalist from Chechnya. For their safety they wished to remain anonymous and excluded identifying features of those they spoke to as well
27 Jan 23 | FEATURED: Martin Bright, Index Arts, News and features, Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Uzbekistan
The title of the play Crimea, 5am refers to the time in the morning the authorities choose to raid the homes of activists in the Russian-occupied territory. It is a time of fear and horror for the Crimean Tatars whose voices make up the text of this verbatim play, taken from the testimonies of the men now held in Putin’s prisons and the families waiting at home for them.
Crimea 5am brings to life one of the lesser-known aspects of the brutal war in Ukraine, which began not in February 2022 but in March 2014. It draws on the oral history of the suppression of the Tatar Muslim minority, who returned to the peninsula in the 1990s following independence after years of exile from their homeland.
Much of what we know of life in Crimea since 2014 has come from activists turned citizen journalists. This is one of the reasons the Russian authorities have cracked down so hard on Tatars, characterizing them either as political extremists or Islamist terrorists linked to the group Hizb-ut-Tahrir.
Two examples from the play show how ordinary Tatars went from being activists, to journalists to dissidents in the face of Russian repression.
Tymur Ibrahimov, 38, moved back to Crimea from Uzbeksitan at the age of six in 1991 after the death of his father. In the play, his wife Diliara, explains his transformation from computer repairman to enemy of the state: “It used to be different, until 2014, you know, back then he would make home videos, he would take pictures of nature, like, of the bees and butterflies on flowers, just like that. It all changed in 2015 and he began making footage of what was going on in Crimea. That is, all the searches, court hearings, “Crimean Solidarity” meetings.” For the crime of recording the resistance of his people Tymur was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Narminan Memedeminov, 39, also moved back to Crimea from Uzbekistan in 1991. After graduating in economics he became involved in human rights activism and media coordinator for the Crimean Solidarity movement. “Here’s an example: I went and took a video of somebody helping out a prisoner’s family, like, basic stuff, they would take the child to the hospital, help them hang the wallpaper, fix the plumbing, send off the parcels to the detention centre and so on… And in the end, everybody involved was at risk: those who took videos, those who helped, those who did anything at all.”
Index editor at large Martin Bright (left) taking part in a post-play discussion.
The stories have been brought together by two Ukrainian writers, Natalia Vorozhbyt and Anastasiia Kosodii and the project is backed by the Ukrainian Institute and the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a way of bringing the situation to international attention. I had the privilege of watching a reading of of the play at the Kiln Theatre, Kilburn in London last week with professional actors alongside non-professional activists and supporters. Directed by Josephine Burton and produced by Dash Arts, the play focuses on the domestic lives of the families of the Tatar political prisoners and particularly the women.
Burton told Index that until the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Crimea has drifted from international attention. “Helped by a media blackout, we forgot that the peninsula has been occupied by Russians for almost nine years now and its Tatar community oppressed,” she said. “Determined to fight this silence, the community has relentlessly documented this oppression – filming and uploading searches, arrests and court cases of its people by the Russian Security Forces. And for this act, these “Citizen Journalists” have been arrested themselves and given insanely long sentences, some for up to 20 years in penal colonies.”
Crimea 5am focuses on the everyday lives of Tatar dissidents, drawn from many hours of recordings with the families of 11 political prisoners. “It builds a beautiful and powerful portrait of a community, ripped apart by this tragedy, but also woven with stories of love and resilience through the prism of the wives left behind. It is this mix of tenderness and humour alongside the unfathomable darkness which enables its impact. We the audience become invested in their lives and feel the impact of their tragedy deeply.”
Dash Arts is looking for further opportunities to perform Crimea 5am: https://www.dasharts.org.uk/
