A Moscow activist says an FSB officer put a gun to his head during a brutal interrogation & threatened to kill him if he didn’t rat out the people helping him to print antiwar stickers. “I’m fucking crazy & I don’t give a shit what happens to me here,” the officer allegedly said.
The interrogators also told him how much they hate the human rights group @hrc_memorial, Nemtsov, and Navalny, and said going against your own country in wartime is inexcusable. They read all the messages in his phone & made him sign a collaborationist pledge to the police.
In the end, they charged him with disobeying an officer & jailed him for 10 days. Yesterday, 2 days after going free, he fled the country. “There was fear & terrible determination in [the cops’] words. They talked about revolution, knowing that it’s coming,” recalls the activist.
This is the story that activist Alexander Teplyakov told @SotaVision. The fellow activist he was forced to name is Dmitry Ivanov, a Moscow State Univ student activist. Ivanov is still in Russia. t.me/sotavision/372…
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Here’s an excellent primer on Russia’s wartime censorship laws from the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis. I’ll add my own brief summary: a thread on the forms of punishment introduced for different “violations.” 1/9 sova-center.ru/misuse/news/la…
Administrative Code 20.3.3 makes it a misdemeanor to “discredit the use of Russia’s military in operations to defend national interests and maintain peace” and outlaws public incitements to prevent such use of the military. First-time offenses are punishable by fines. 2/9
The second clause of this administrative code makes it an aggravated offense when the first offense is combined with calls for unpermitted protests. 3/9
Sources tell the sometimes reliable outlet Baza that Russian officials have decided to press FELONY, not misdemeanor, charges against Ovsyannikova, bringing the full force of the new law against her (public disinfo, not merely discrediting the military). Up to 15 years in prison.
Meanwhile, @pchikov shares a different report arguing that she’ll face up to 10 years in prison, not the full 15. But still arguing that felony charges are coming. t.me/NetFreedomsPro…
Apparently, a woman just ran onto the stage during a Russian state television news broadcast with a sign that said, “Stop the war! Don’t believe propaganda! They’re lying to you here!”
And she’s chanting in Russian, “No to war! Stop the war!”
For those saying this demonstrator will automatically get 15 years in prison: I believe that prison only becomes a punishment for “war disinfo” with repeat offenses. So for that to be in play, she’d need a previous conviction, or they’d need to charge her with 2 crimes here.
Putin just greenlit Russia’s nationalization campaign. Foreign companies that leave could (will?) find their properties seized and placed under “external management.”
Russia’s Economic Development Ministry has already drafted a bill that would entrust management of these seized assets to the VEB.RF state development corporation and to Russia’s Deposit Insurance Agency.
It would be these organizations’ job to “repackage” seized businesses into new entities and then sell them at public auction. If no suitable buyer can be found, the state itself would act as the buyer.
Russian Defense Ministry today: Welcome to Project UP-4, a top secret biolab network scattered in Kyiv, Odesa, and Kharkiv. Initially tasked with extra-weaponizing H5N1 using birds known to migrate through Russia. Also there’s P-781, same idea but BATS. t.me/rian_ru/152577
The Kharkiv biolab was also exploring how to infect Russians with diseases using fleas and ticks!Using illegal Japanese military research from the 1940s!!
America and its allies were seeking bioweapons “capable of selectively affecting various ethnic groups”!!!!!!!
You see this magazine cover making the rounds a lot right now because it demonstrates how the U.S. media can get behind a good ole bombing campaign. Sept. 1995. Leaving aside the rest of this deeply flawed comparison, what was the follow-up reporting from Time? Skip to Nov. 1995.
Ends w/ this humdinger: “Ideally, the US would exert a stable, reliable force throughout the world that is something like gravity. If NATO breaks up over Bosnia, & the US keeps retreating from leadership, int’l relations could be a little like Earth with the gravity turned off.”
And then, a few months later in May 1996, this was the cover. Cover story ends: “If, in the short run, only a fool would be optimistic about Russia’s course, the eventual outcome seems favorable.”