#Mikhail Beketov

[ta9158234]

The mass grave

In November 2008, Mikhail Beketov was attacked and brutally beaten. He spent the next 18 months in hospitals, where doctors removed the shattered skull fragments that pierced his brain and amputated his right foot and three fingers on his left hand. He spent the rest of his short life confined to a wheelchair, barely able to speak. Five years later, Beketov died.

The journalist’s assailants were never identified. Beketov suggested that Khimki Mayor Yuri Korablin may have been behind the attack. Several months earlier, he had started receiving threats, and in 2007 someone set fire to his car. Beketov said the intimidation was linked to his critical news reporting about construction projects approved by the city.

From 1994 to 2001, Mikhail Beketov served as the press secretary for Khimki Mayor Yuri Korablin. After leaving office, he used his own resources to launch Khimkinskaya Pravda, an opposition newspaper that was highly critical of the city’s new mayor, Vladimir Strelchenko. Beginning in 2007, Khimkinskaya Pravda covered various local conflicts, including the battle to preserve the Khimki Forest. The newspaper made a name for itself with a series of articles about the reburial of the remains of six military pilots from a mass grave located in a public square near the Leningrad Highway.

The authorities in Khimki justified the mass grave’s relocation as necessary for the expansion of the Leningradskoye Highway (though journalists also reported that officials were concerned about prostitutes working in the same public square, supposedly “defiling the memory of Russia’s fallen war heroes”). Local activists argued that the pilots’ remains were moved to free up land for the construction of a new shopping center. After reporting by Khimkinskaya Pravda, national TV networks and other activists started paying attention to the story about the mass grave.

Mikhail Beketov wrote that tractors were used to pull up the soldiers’ graves, and the men’s bones were tossed into plastic bags. Some of the remains were apparently lost. On network television, Beketov shared photographs he’d taken at the former site of the mass grave, showing what appeared to be human bones lying around. Because of the newspaper’s coverage, and because Beketov accused him of destroying his car, Mayor Strelchenko filed a defamation lawsuit against Khimkinskaya Pravda’s founder.

Today, business centers occupy the forested space for which Beketov gave his life. After the public controversy, however, Khimki’s authorities stopped short of building up the territory completely (though the land was already demarcated on the city’s estate map), and officials limited development to the roadside area. A year after the pilots were reburied, a business center was built a few hundred yards from the former site of the mass grave. The building belongs to Evgeny Golovkin, the son of Nikolai Golovkin, who managed Moscow’s Main Internal Affairs Directorate from 2001 to 2014. The companies that eventually took up residence at Golovkin’s business center include several businesses then owned by the wife of Vyacheslav Nyrkov, the head of “Ritual-Khimki” (the enterprise that was responsible for reburying the pilots).

[freepib]

Russian reporter Borodin dead after mystery fall

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Image copyrightMAXIM BORODIN/FACEBOOK

Image captionMaxim Borodin had contacted a friend the day before he was found seriously injured beneath his fifth-floor flat

A Russian investigative journalist who wrote about the deaths of mercenaries in Syria has died in hospital after falling from his fifth-floor flat.

Maxim Borodin was found badly injured by neighbours in Yekaterinburg and taken to hospital, where he later died.

Local officials said no suicide note was found but the incident was unlikely to be of a criminal nature.

However, a friend revealed Borodin had said his flat had been surrounded by security men a day earlier.

Vyacheslav Bashkov described Borodin as a “principled, honest journalist” and said Borodin had contacted him at five o’clock in the morning on 11 April saying there was “someone with a weapon on his balcony and people in camouflage and masks on the staircase landing”.

Borodin had been looking for a lawyer, he explained, although he later called him back saying he was wrong and that the security men had been taking part in some sort of exercise.

After he was found badly injured at the foot of the building on Thursday, regional authorities said the door of his flat had been locked from the inside, indicating that no-one else had either entered or left the flat.

The chief editor of Novy Den, where Borodin worked, said before he died that she could not rule out a crime, adding there was no reason for him to kill himself.

Harlem Désir of the international monitoring organisation OSCE said the death was “of serious concern” and called for a thorough investigation.

What did Borodin write?

In recent weeks, the journalist had written about Russian mercenaries known as the “Wagner Group” who were reportedly killed in Syria on 7 February in a confrontation with US forces.

Last week, the outgoing head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, said that “a couple hundred” Russian mercenaries died in the clash in Deir al-Zour province. The mercenaries were apparently taking part in an attack by pro-Syrian government fighters on the headquarters of a US ally, the Syrian Democratic Forces

Last month, Borodin had written that three of those killed had come from the Sverdlovsk region in the Urals, in which Yekaterinburg is the main city. Two of the men were from the towns of Asbest and one from Kedrovoye, he said.

He had also investigated political scandals, including allegations made by a Belarusian escort known as Nastya Rybka in a video posted by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Journalism is a dangerous business in Russia

Journalists in Russia have often been harassed or attacked in recent years for their work. On the same day that Maxim Borodin was found fatally injured, the editor of an official regional newspaper was assaulted in Yekaterinburg, reports say.

Much of Russia’s media is controlled by the state and Russia is ranked 83rd out of 100 countries for press freedom by Freedom House.

One of Russia’s best-known investigative reporters, Anna Politkovskaya, was shot dead in a lift at her block of flats in 2006. Politkovskaya exposed Russian human rights abuses in Chechnya.

Image copyrightAFP

Image captionAnna Politkovskaya’s reports were highly critical of President Vladimir Putin

Two years later, journalist Mikhail Beketov was left brain-damaged. He had highlighted corruption and fought against the planned destruction of the Khimki forest near Moscow to make way for a road. He died in 2013.

Oleg Kashin, was severely injured in an assault in Moscow in 2010. He had been reporting on protests against the Khimki forest highway.

Last year, well-known Russian radio presenter Tatyana Felgengauer was stabbed in the neck while at work at her radio station, Ekho Mosvky.

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[newsgur]

¿Un periodismo sin riesgo?

Los periodistas ambientales siguen bajo el atropello de las políticas internacionales respecto al ambiente. Ejemplo de ello es, según Reporteros sin Fronteras, Uzbeko Solidzhon Abdurakhmanov quien está encarcelado por describir en muchos escritos las consecuencias de la desaparición del mar Aral. En Rusia, el periodista Mikhail Beketov fue víctima de una violenta agresión que le costó una pierna y fuertes secuelas físicas mientras denunciaba un proyecto de vía rápida a través del bosque de Khimki, cerca de Moscú. Igualmente, En Brasil, Lucio Flavio Pinto, fundador de la revista independiente Jornal Pessoal, aún recibe muchas denuncias tras investigar la deforestación en Amazonia.

http://es.newsgur.com/2017/07/un-periodismo-sin-riesgo.html

[inbonobo]

#Russian pensioner Vladimir #Ionov was assaulted by #SERB protesters with a green liquid while #demonstrating against the #government near the #Kremlin in October 2015.

Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and his supporters have accused a notorious Russian nationalist group of assaulting him with a green antiseptic -- known in Russian as "zelyonka" -- in an attack that could leave him with permanent eye damage.

One member of the group, which calls itself the South East Radical Block (SERB), admitted to the respected independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper that he filmed the April 27 attack in Moscow, a disclosure that came after a Navalny supporter uncovered hidden videos on a Russian TV network's website showing the man, Aleksei Kulakov, at the scene.

But both he and SERB leader Igor Beketov, an actor who goes by the nom de guerre Gosha Tarasevich, have denied that the group was involved. Beketov said in a radio interview that the activist accused by Navalny of carrying out the assault, a man named Aleksandr Petrunko, has an alibi clearing him of complicity in the attack.

Navalny, who has accused authorities of failing to investigate the incident, said his doctor believes that the zelyonka -- a common weapon used in attacks against opposition activists -- was mixed with another substance that caused chemical burns to his right eye.

The incident has cast a national spotlight on SERB, which by its own accountconsists of just a handful of "radical" members whose goal is to "support a cult of traditional Russian family values and put an end to the moral decay of society being forced upon us by the West and America."

To this end, it says it reserves the right to use any method in line with its "conscience," which appears to include dousing political opponents not only with zelyonka but also human waste.

Here's a look at SERB and its harassment of Kremlin critics and others it deems insufficiently patriotic.

Ukraine Origins

SERB appears to have emerged in eastern Ukraine around the time of the 2014 ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin ally, amid mass street protests that preceded Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and backing of armed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Beketov's acting profile states that he graduated from university in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, and both he and Petrunko claim they took part in 2014 protests in another eastern city, Kharkiv, against the pro-Western government that took power in Kyiv after Yanukovych fled to Russia.

Petrunko claimed in an interview last year that he was arrested by Ukrainian security services after he participated in an unsuccessful bid to seize a government building in Kharkiv, the Russian website Znak.com reported.Sometime after that, both he and Beketov made their way to Russia, where they subsequently began staging guerrilla actions against Kyiv supporters and Kremlin opponents. Many of these stunts have turned violent.

Let Them Eat Cake … And Feces

While SERB has denied splashing zelyonka on Navalny, the assault was consistent with the style of the group. Its activists have used a range of substances in its attacks on opponents, including fecal matter and urine.

In February 2015, SERB members scuffled with activists from the Russian opposition group Solidarity who were staging a protest in central Moscow against the war between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists. At one point, an unidentified assailant tossed a plastic bag filled with feces at a Solidarity activist, smearing the target's coat with excrement.

Beketov took credit for the stunt in a subsequent Facebook post, saying the Solidarity protesters had "a liter of crap" dumped on them for "insulting" Russia and President Vladimir Putin.

SERB was suspected in an August 2016 attack against Russian journalist Yulia Latynina, a fierce Putin critic, in which an unidentified assailant tossed fecal matter from a bucket on her as she was walking on the street.

The group does not appear to have expressly claimed credit for that attack, though it has not denied involvement either. An interviewer sympathetic to SERB stated as fact in a February discussion with Beketov that the group had doused Latynina with feces. Beketov did not contradict the claim in the interview published by the website KolokolRussia.ru.

SERB published a gleeful post about the Latynina attack on its page on the Russian social-networking site VKontakte, winking at readers by saying that "there is every reason to believe" the group knows the circumstances behind the assault.

Petrunko, whom Navalny accused of attacking him with zelyonka, also served a short stint in jail last year after throwing urine at photographs by U.S. photographer Jock Sturges being exhibited at a Moscow museum. Petrunko denounced the images as child pornography.

SERB activists also doused an elderly anti-Kremlin protester with an unidentified green liquid in October 2015, saying they "defended the honor of the president and did not allow a group of traitors to Russia to insult our president."

Just over a year ago, meanwhile, a SERB activist smashed a cake into Navalny's face at the same place that the Kremlin opponent was doused with zelyonka last week: outside the Moscow office of his anticorruption group.

Nemtsov Memorial

SERB activists have also attacked the makeshift memorial to the late Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov at the site of his February 2014 assassination on a bridge just steps from the Kremlin. The group, which calls Nemtsov a "traitor," has destroyed signs, photographs, and flowers placed there by the slain Kremlin critic's supporters in his honor.

"SERB fights and will always fight with traitors of Russia," Beketov wrote in a post about the destruction of the memorial, accusing Nemtsov of "always supporting America's interests and spitting on Russia's interests."

Kremlin opponents accuse Russian state media of conducting a demonization campaign against Nemtsov using similar rhetoric that they say helped lead to his killing, which several defendants from the Russian North Caucasus region of Chechnya are accused of carrying out.

Political Connections?

Navalny has accused Putin's administration and Russian security services of involvement in the guerrilla attacks against him, including the most recent zelyonka attack. The Kremlin has previously denied being part of any campaign to discredit or intimidate Navalny, and Gazeta.ru on April 30 cited Kremlin "sources" as saying that it had no role in a spate of recent attacks against opposition activists.

No clear evidence has emerged suggesting the Kremlin is funding or otherwise directing SERB activists, though they have been able to get face time with senior Russian officials. Photographs have surfaced in recent days showing the group's members standing next to federal lawmakers and a senior Putin aide.

The photographs include one of Petrunko together with Pyotr Tolstoy, a member of Putin's ruling United Russia party and deputy speaker in the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament.

Вице-спикер ГосДумы от "Единой России" Петр Толстой с чуваком, плеснувшим в меня зелёнкой с кислотой. (А экстремист все равно ты) pic.twitter.com/H6ptlTVGjZ

Another photograph shows Petrunko together with Kremlin economic adviser Sergei Glazyev, who has been sanctioned by both the United States and the European Union over Russia's seizure of Crimea.

В серию не проходите мимо!!! Запомните урода!!! Справа - Глазьев.Слева - человек, плеснувший Навальному в лицо зеленкой: Александр Петрунько pic.twitter.com/oej8TdIXWb

In a blog post published one day before last week's attack on Navalny, Beketov posted photographs of himself inside the Duma and claimed he was invited there by federal lawmakers.

He claimed that he met with senior lawmakers who "listened very carefully" about SERB's experience in "resisting attempts to organize a Maidan in Russia," referring to the Kyiv square at the center of the protests that led to Yanukovych's 2014 ouster in Ukraine.

Yevgeny Revenko, a senior United Russia lawmaker in the Duma, wrote in a May 1 Facebook post that zelyonka attacks and other "hooligan" acts "are not a means of political battle, but rather a crime."

"I am certain that my party colleagues share this view," he wrote.

(via Urine, Feces, And 'Zelyonka': Meet The Russian Radicals Using Dirty Weapons On Kremlin Critics)

[russianreader]

Yevgeniya Chirikova and Nadezhda Kutepova: Open Letter to Dr. Jill Stein

Yevgeniya Chirikova and Nadezhda Kutepova: Open Letter to Dr. Jill Stein

Yevgenia Chirikova

Yevgeniya Chirikova Facebook September 6, 2016

Open Letter to Dr. Jill Stein, 2016 Green Party Candidate for President of the United States

Dear Dr. Stein,

We are writing to you in the spirit of green values and principles, which include fighting for a sustainable future, defending the environment and human rights, and engaging in international solidarity. We are also writing…

[nashlittlemir-blog]

Путиновскую премию тяжело пострадавшему Бекетову

Михаилу Бекетову, жестоко избитому журналисту в 2008 году, Путин вручил премию "правительства России 2011 года в области печатных СМИ." Бекетов выступал за защиту Химского леса, в последствие чего был жестоко избит: "Михаил Бекетов был жестоко избит неизвестными в 2008 году, после чего стал инвалидом первой группы. Ему были ампутированы три пальца на левой руке и правая нога, проведены операции на мозге, долгое время он не мог говорить. Дело об избиении Бекетова до сих пор не раскрыто. Нападение на журналиста связывали с его публикациями в защиту Химкинского леса, в которых содержались выпады против городских властей." (Эксперт) Совершенно согласна со статьей Олега Кашина - это просто пиар, очеловечивание Путина, пыль в глаза, о том что все нормально со свободной прессой и журналистов не избивают, а наоборот - награждают. Сам Кашин, корреспондент ИД Коммерсантъ, тоже перенес тяжелое избиение два года назад. "В "Коммерсанте" Кашин специализировался на общественно-политической тематике, в частности, писал про митинги, акции протеста, марши несогласных, молодежные политические объединения, освещал деятельность президента РФ Дмитрия Медведева." (Коммерсантъ)