Thread by @AAAAramyan

Hi, I'm Armen Aramyan, founding editor of @doxajournal, and I've spent the last 12 months under house arrest due to a criminal investigation. My colleagues and I face up to 3 years in a Russian prison for a short video that we recorded in January 2021. Here's our story. THREAD 🧵

In January 2021 a leader of the Russian democratic movement Alexey Navalny returned to Russia after an unsuccessful attempt of poisoning him by Russian special services. Immediately upon his return to Moscow, he was arrested. This spurred a new wave of protests all over Russia.

DOXA is an independent media outlet that a team of Russian students launched 5 years ago. From the beginning, DOXA served as a platform for the empowerment of the student and activist community in Russia.

We’ve covered political censorship in Russian universities, supported young activists persecuted for their beliefs, and were one of the first Russian media to cover sexual harassment on campus.

When protests surrounding Navalny's arrest erupted, we started receiving complaints from students all over Russia. Many of our informants in dozens of universities claimed that their institutions threatened them with expulsions and other consequences for going to protest rallies.

As student media in Russia, we were used to such stories. Before this we had already experienced various censorship from Russian unis: DOXA used to be a student organization at the Higher School of Economics, but after the 2019 protests in Moscow HSE revoked our registration.

I was expelled from a Ph.D. program at HSE half a year later.

But this time the political pressure on students took an unprecedented and systematic turn. We've registered around a hundred cases in 53 higher education institutions. We decided to record a short video clip to address this issue.

In this clip, we demanded government and university officials to stop threatening students and expressed our support and solidarity with students who were being pressured due to their political activity.

This 3-minute clip gathered a few thousand views from our student audience. A few days later Russian censorship agency 'Roskomnadzor' obliged us to remove the clip. We removed it (to avoid the blocking of our whole website) and have filed a lawsuit against Roskomnadzor.

This was in January. On April 14th at 6 am police has raided the apartments of all of the DOXA editors involved with the video clip - me, Natalia Tyshkevich, Alla Gutnikova, Vladimir Metyolkin.

The police raid took place in our flats, in DOXA’s office, and in the apartments of our parents. Police confiscated all of our personal devices, all the video production equipment in our office, and even the smartphones and laptops of our parents and siblings.

After the raid we were taken to court that decided to place us under house arrest until the end of the investigation. The investigator and the prosecutor claimed that otherwise we could threaten witnesses, or hinder the investigation process in some other way.

We were charged with article 151.2 of the Russian Criminal Code - involvement of minors in life-threatening activity. The investigative Committee claimed that our video has forced minors to join the protests during the COVID-19 pandemic, which presented a threat to their lives.

Basically, they claimed that minors watched our video, and went to protests, where they could catch COVID-19 and die.

Why such an absurd accusation? From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic Russian state has used pandemic legislation to ban all political opposition in Russia. It proclaimed any political rallies and other actions illegal due to the epidemiological situation.

Even now, Russia has lifted all pandemic-related restrictions EXCEPT the protest ban. You can go to the theatre, to the restaurant or to the cinema, but not to the open-air rally. Russian activists joke that apparently apolitical people are immune to COVID-19.

As you can expect, it’s difficult to prove such a fantastic accusation. To prove it you have to find an underaged person who watched our video, went to protests, got COVID-19 there (which is almost impossible to prove), and prove that this threatened his/her/their life.

So, in the next few months after the raid, we had to endure a Kafkaesque investigation process. We were forced to undergo dozens of interrogations and afterward, we had an opportunity to study the criminal case materials.

We learned that investigators questioned all of the minors detained at the protests on January 23rd all over Russia (a few hundred people). None of these teenagers have seen our video.

Basically, the only parody of the proof was a report by a linguist who 'studied' our video. Specifically, in her report, she claimed that by saying ‘Don’t be afraid and don’t stay aside’ in our video we forced teenagers to join the specific protests on a specific date.

So basically instead of saying: OK, we fucked up, we don’t have any proof at all for this case, the Investigation Committee compiled 213 volumes of bullshit paperwork - pandemic regulations in all of the Russian regions, ...

interrogations of dozens of teenagers who’ve never heard of DOXA or of our video clip, documents about the lessons about World War 2 that was organized in Russian schools, etc. Even Kafka would be impressed if he had a chance to learn about this case.

Due to the scale of this bullshit, the investigation went on for 5 months and trials started in October. We’ve spent all of this time under house arrest which destroyed our ordinary lives.

video: activists chanting 'we are DOXA'

Alla and Volodya - both final-year undergrad students - had to drop out of their unis, as they couldn't study under house arrest.

In the past 12 months, we’ve been through around 30 interrogations, we’ve spent months reading this bullshit case, and through dozens of court hearings that didn’t mean shit.

Our colleagues, friends, and relatives were also intimidated by authorities. One of the investigators who led our case even threatened my younger siblings with criminal prosecution against them.

During these 12 months, we became witnesses to how the Russian political elite continued to destroy any hope for change in our country. Change that we were fighting for in DOXA.

We witnessed how independent Russian media and political organizations were destroyed in the summer of 2021 with many of the journalists and activists fleeing the country.

We witnessed how Putin's elite have stolen the 2021 Parliament elections once again, securing the majority for the ‘United Russia’ party. On February 24th with the whole world, we witnessed how Putin's criminal regime has invaded Ukraine.

But DOXA has refused to halt. We've closely covered Russian aggression in Ukraine, and anti-war initiatives in Russia that could oppose and stop this war. Our website was currently blocked three times by Russian censors.

DOXA has continued to work when many of the more established and professional media have ceased to function under the pressure from the Russian state.

In a week or so we will receive the verdict from the court. We face up to 3 years in prison for a short video clip that none of the 'witnesses' have even seen. These days, of course, I'm afraid for my personal safety.

I’m afraid that I won’t meet my girlfriend Nastya, who is a Ukrainian journalist that had to flee the war with her family in Kyiv and whom I haven't seen in a year (it's not very safe for Ukrainian journalists to come to Moscow, as you can guess).

Of course, I’m not a fan of prisons. But what I'm really scared of is that we will lose. That we won’t be able to stop the criminal elite that is committing war crimes in Ukraine and inflicting so much pain and suffering to the Ukrainian people.

I want to continue to fight and I can’t do that from the prison cell.

You can support arrested DOXA editors by spreading information and awareness about our case. You can share this thread or one of these articles/videos created by international journalists:

great film by Olga Khrustaleva for @ajenglish: aljazeera.com/program/al-jaz…

an interview of Alla Gutnikova by @TheEconomist: economist.com/1843/2021/11/1…

In the first weeks after our arrest, dozens of various organizations have expressed their solidarity with us: @BlackSocialists @EASAInfo @PENamerica @OSCE @amnesty @Transparency_ru @RSF_ru @globalvoices @pressfreedom and many others.

The most prominent Russian human rights organization Memorial has recognized us as political prisoners: memohrc.org/en/news_old/fo…

If you’re a journalist, you can contact the DOXA team and cover our case in your media outlet: [e-mail]

Other than that, a year-long criminal case has put a burden on DOXA's team as a whole. In the past few weeks, DOXA continues to bravely cover the war and anti-war protests in Russia. Support our work on Patreon: patreon.com/doxajournal

or through crypto currency:

Bitcoin: bc1qcp8839vknwqffvnd6r0t0rqtke9ajzt2ca2pap
Ethereum, USDT, USDC: 0x09DF23795efeCb7405D3F5c9dB0DbDA4a6e8b874

Of course it’s @doxa_journal not @DoxaJournal! Sorry for the typo in the first tweet. Btw subscribe to our Twitter page!

https://twitter.com/aaaaramyan/status/1509647099020906503